By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, June 05, 2022
The Supreme Court’s illegal and unconstitutional Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 entailed three kinds of violence: It enabled obvious physical violence toward the unborn, it was a fifth-column assault on the integrity and legitimacy of one of our three branches of government, and it directly attacked the fundamental basis of American democracy by disenfranchising U.S. voters — all of them — through an act of judicial imperialism.
There are some important aspects of American life that are not subject to a vote or to the will of any majority, and bless the wisdom of the Founders for that. We have a Bill of Rights that expressly puts some things — your freedom of speech, your right to the free exercise of your religion, your right to keep and bear arms — beyond the reach of the grubby hands of politicians. Abortion is not on that list. But over the course of the 20th century, the Supreme Court took on the role of an Iran-style “Guardian Council” — one set of black robes is as good as the next! — and began to interpret its authority in an essentially religious way, arrogating to itself the power to strike down laws not because they offended the Bill of Rights or some other part of the text of the Constitution but because they offended the justices’ personal sense of morality. It was out of this development that Roe and many other unconstitutional acts of judicial supremacism were extracted.
When Roe v. Wade robbed Americans of the ability to vote on the question of abortion, most of those who cared deeply about the issues involved (and there is more than one issue involved: abortion and judicial supremacism are distinct questions) set about on a responsible and humane program of opposition and reform: They would never accept the legitimacy of Roe, and they would work to convince both the general public and, more important, the class of people who become Supreme Court justices, that theirs was the right position. They founded organizations and, in an excellent example of how liberal democracy is actually supposed to work, learned to collaborate with those who did not necessarily share their view of abortion but did share their view of the role of the Supreme Court — it should be remembered that in its early days, the Federalist Society was home to a great many pro-choice libertarians whose opposition to judicial supremacism was independent of the abortion issue per se. This began in earnest the year I was born, and, if the Dobbs decision goes the way we expect it to, Roe should be overturned right before my 50th birthday. Anybody who says that Americans are incapable of paying attention to anything of importance for more than five minutes should consider the campaign against Roe v. Wade.
But not everybody signed up for that reform project. A very small number of abortion opponents, probably never numbering more than a few hundred active agents, took a different view and a different approach: They concluded that, having been stripped of their vote and the ability to effect change by democratic means, their only practical alternative was direct action, too often in the form of terrorism: bombings, arson, assassinations. The pro-life movement, to its credit, did not play footsie with the violent radicals on its fringe — in this, it was unlike many other American political movements, notably the environmental movement and the post-1960s progressives who brought impenitent terrorists such as Bill Ayers into the Democratic fold. The pro-life movement rejected political violence and worked to bring the radicals around to the cause of reform. “Be patient,” we told them. “We also want to end abortion, but we do not want to lose the rule of law, civil society, our country, and our souls in the process.”
Now, as Democrats threaten to execute their own version of January 6, perpetrating what would amount to a coup d’état by effectively dissolving the Supreme Court and replacing it with a new one willing to give them the unconstitutional outcomes they demand, the specter of wider and more intense political violence is summoned.
Democrats threatened to “expand” the Supreme Court — by which they mean to keep adding new members until they have a majority that they are confident will rule their way, Constitution be damned — earlier this year in response to the Dobbs leak, and, now, in their push to gut Americans’ civil rights as though the Second Amendment did not exist, they are doing so again. The gun-rights movement has been remarkably (though not perfectly) peaceful as progressives have worked to strip gun-owners of their constitutional rights — something that is really quite notable, given how well-armed this demographic is. (It is almost as though legal gun-ownership is not the relevant variable when it comes to criminal violence!) If Democrats do what figures such as Representative Mondaire Jones (D., N.Y.) suggest, they will be very much a mirror image of the January 6 insurrectionists in their belief that any democratic or legal process that does not give them the outcome they want is ipso facto illegitimate. This is dishonest, craven, imbecilic — and dangerous.
Abortion opponents followed procedure and trusted in the democratic and constitutional processes for 50 years, and Second Amendment defenders have done the same, winning a key victory (though not a dispositive one) in the 2008 Heller decision. And now Democrats, who apparently never considered the possibility that they could lose at the Supreme Court, threaten to upend the entire constitutional order in a fit of pique, partisanship, and corruption. They already have corrupted the nomination process, beginning with Robert Bork and the smearing of Clarence Thomas, and then escalating into the fusillade of salacious — and entirely fictitious — allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Now, because even all this has failed to give them what they want, they threaten the Supreme Court itself.
This is dangerous and irresponsible, and it threatens to unleash political violence of a kind not seen in these United States since the 19th century. If you cut off the legitimate means of political change, people inevitably will turn to others. Much of the country, including partisans on both sides, is already spoiling for a fight, and looking for an excuse. The Democrats are very close to giving them one.
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