The Question Biden Won’t Answer

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 11, 2020

 

 Joe Biden’s refusal to answer the straightforward question of whether he would, if elected, knuckle under to the daft court-packing scheme demanded by the progressive wing of his party is the Biden style in toto: dishonest, cowardly, and self-serving. His rationale — Gosh, people might criticize me for either answer! — is amusing in its cravenness, but it won’t do.

 

This is not one of those “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” questions they ask Republicans — Will you promise not to engage in outright violent civil war if the Democrat wins in Iowa’s Second Congressional District? — but a real policy question. And the voters ought to have an answer to it before Election Day.

 

The Democratic case for packing the courts, as made by, most recently, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is a kind of confession. The Left understands the Supreme Court as a genie that exists to grant Democratic wishes: Poof! Abortion! Shazam! Gay marriage! It is far more convenient to enjoy one-stop utopianism imposed by the Supreme Court than to have 50 fights in the state legislatures in Topeka, Lansing, Boise, etc. The Left consequently understands that a Court constrained by textualism — the radical belief that we write down laws for a reason rather than simply asking Jamelle Bouie what he’d prefer — would be a hindrance to its political agenda, which includes serial violations of the Bill of Rights on matters ranging from free speech to freedom of religion to the right to keep and bear arms. (One half-expects Elizabeth Warren and Jacob Frey to pop up like pests in some political version of Whac-A-Mole and make the case for the forced quartering of federal troops.) That is one of the things that must be plainly understood about the question that Joe Biden refuses to answer: The assault on the Supreme Court is only a proxy for an assault on the Bill of Rights.

 

The court-packing scheme is part of a series of proffered shenanigans by which the Democratic Party means to establish long-term single-party rule in the United States. The only real reason for turning the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico into a state, as some Democrats demand, would be creating new Senate seats that would be entirely or almost entirely Democratic. Abolishing the Electoral College — which is to say, usurping the role of the states in presidential elections — is of interest to Democrats only because they believe that they would win more presidential elections under a national electoral system than under the current federal system. We have seen similar shenanigans conducted at the state level: California’s so-called open-primary system was presented as a progressive advance for democracy, but it is simply a way to keep Republican candidates off of general-election ballots in many cases and offer Californians instead the choice between a Democrat and a different Democrat.

 

These shenanigans are, in turn, part of an even broader project to entrench Democratic power and stamp out all dissent, an effort that includes: the weaponization of the IRS and ATF, the cynical abuse of the NLRB, the perversion of prosecutorial powers as political weapons in political vendettas carried out by Kamala Harris and Democratic prosecutors in New York, Democratic attempts to legally abolish activist groups or bully banks and insurance companies into denying them ordinary financial services, the weaponization of employment and access to college education as instruments of political coercion, the misuse of national-security powers to target a Republican presidential campaign, and, now, the systematic campaign of riots and arson leading up to the 2020 election.

 

When Kamala Harris was trying to use her powers as attorney general in California to bully conservative nonprofits and conduct a campaign of political extortion against their donors, the only things standing in her way were the First Amendment and federal courts committed to upholding it and our constitutional rights rather than acting as Democratic factota. It is worth keeping in mind that conservatives’ political speech — Democrats’ desire to legally suppress it — was the motivation behind Harry Reid’s 2014 effort to gut the First Amendment, an effort supported by every single Democrat then serving in the Senate. Democrats are not proposing to gerrymander the Senate and blow up the Supreme Court as ends in themselves — they propose to do these things in order to be able to whittle away the Bill of Rights until it is diminished enough that it no longer gets in their way.

 

I would like to know what Joe Biden thinks about that. Wouldn’t you?