By Isaac Schorr
Monday, September 28, 2020
As Democrats publicly flirt with all manner of ideas
about how to exercise power they have yet to attain — ranging from the
believable to the nakedly partisan and self-destructive — it’s worth
remembering that the American Left has never been shy about wanting to change
all sorts of rules when our system of government does not serve their political
interests.
There are of course the famous historical examples.
Democratic dreams of filling the Supreme Court with justices sympathetic to
their agenda did not begin after Donald Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch
and Brett Kavanaugh to the bench. FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court after it
struck down parts of his New Deal. Thankfully, leaders in both parties,
including Roosevelt’s own vice president, John Nance Garner, opposed and
successfully thwarted the power grab. But there are many more elaborate and
recent instances of “creative” Democratic thinking that merit mentioning.
Court-packing is only one component of the Left’s assault
on Article III of the Constitution. In the House of Representatives,
Representatives Ro Khanna and Joe Kennedy III have put forward a bill that
would limit Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms. No one found lifetime
appointments problematic when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appointed two
justices each, but now that three seats have opened up during Donald Trump’s
first term, they are of great concern. Per
Khanna, “we can’t face a national crisis every time a vacancy occurs on the
Supreme Court.” Of course, we only ever seem to face a “crisis” when a
Republican president fills a vacancy.
Article I also needs revision to suit the Democrats’
needs. One idea that has traction among the liberal intelligentsia is abolishing
the Senate — that is, half of the supreme branch of our government. At Vox,
Jonathan M. Ladd writes that “the Senate gives a big advantage to voters in
small states, because every state gets an equal number of Senators.” Well yes,
that is kind of the point. Many compromises were reached in 1787 at the
constitutional convention, but the only one that earned the moniker of “the
Great Compromise” was Roger Sherman’s proposal that the House of
Representatives would have proportional representation while the Senate would
protect the interests of smaller states with equal representation. This was the
compact under which the original states formed the Union and it is the compact
under which 37 more states have joined. It’s also an arrangement that merited no
reconsideration in 2009, when Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate with
which they could enact their agenda without meaningful protest. Only since
Republicans defended the upper chamber for the third straight cycle in 2018
have progressive thinkers begun to call the Senate an undemocratic institution.
What they really mean is that it’s un-Democratic.
If the Senate must persist, though, former
president Barack Obama insists that the legislative filibuster be done away
with. In fact, in a July eulogy for John Lewis, Obama — anticipating a Biden
presidency and narrow Democratic majority in the Senate after November — called
the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.” In another life, Senator Obama of Illinois
had no problem with using that relic to delay Samuel Alito’s confirmation to
the Supreme Court. But with the polls favoring his party, the time has come to
rid the country of this bigoted albatross.
But the theories and strategies get even zanier than
this. Take the reaction
of Dahlia Lithwick, a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor
at Slate, to Senate Republicans’ decision not to give Merrick Garland a
hearing after President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court. She
attributed their decision not to consent to Garland’s elevation from the D.C.
Circuit to an “Insanity Gap” between the parties that causes Republicans “to
throw away any sense of pride, integrity, or even long-term strategic thinking
in favor of acting like toddlers having a tantrum next to a Snickers bar in the
checkout line.” Lithwick, only half-kidding, suggested that the Senate’s
decision not to consider Garland could have been interpreted as implicit
approval of his nomination, and that he should have just walked into the
Supreme Court and seated himself. I say half-kidding because while her piece’s
subheading is “a modest proposal for how Merrick Garland can outfox Republican
obstructionists,” she also says that “if you’re the law review type, here is a very
plausible argument that this is actually the case.” It’s the constitutional
version of “haha . . . just kidding . . . unless . . .”
The lunacy extends into the financial sphere as well. In
2011, when Republicans forced President Obama to agree to spending cuts before
they raised the debt ceiling, the idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin and
using that to finance the federal government’s debt was floated in a financial
blog’s comments section. By 2013, it had become a mainstream idea promoted in
the pages of Bloomberg, Business Insider, The Atlantic,
and even by Representative Jerrold Nadler. Rather than accepting the
consequences of divided government and negotiating, some Democrats preferred to
fantasize over an
idea that would expose the United States as politically dysfunctional and a
financial paper tiger.
Every political party has its problems and cranks. For
its part, the GOP is notable for being plagued with grifters
and a small but damaging alt-right contingent. On the other hand, the Democrats
are unique in their willingness to cavalierly toss aside rules, institutions,
and even entire sections of the Constitution if those things stand in the way
of their immediate goals. But it’s not just the party’s resident loons who
embrace this mentality. It’s almost the entire staff at Vox, it’s Joe
Kennedy III and Jerry Nadler, it’s even FDR and Barack Obama — the party’s two
most popular presidents of the last century. For a party running on a return to
normalcy, it’s a troubling track record. An insanity gap may exist, but it’s
not the one Dahlia Lithwick believes in.
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