Kamala Harris Tells Us Who She Is

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

 

Kamala Harris is so moderate that she only wants to pack the Supreme Court by stealth.

 

By poorly disguised stealth, to be sure, but it’s difficult to obscure the intended destruction of an institution of American government.

 

The newly minted Democratic presidential candidate has endorsed President Joe Biden’s plan for Supreme Court “reform,” the centerpiece of which is a proposal for an 18-year term limit that would immediately usher Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito off the Court.

 

This is Court-packing by another name.

 

Biden also wants an enforceable ethics code imposed on the Court and a constitutional amendment saying that presidents don’t have immunity from prosecution for their official acts, countering the Supreme Court’s recent decision on this question.

 

Harris is strongly in favor: “These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy and ensure no one is above the law.”

 

They will do none of the above. As a matter of basic legitimacy, foundational rules of government should be fashioned without knowing which party or faction will benefit from them, or be harmed by them.

 

The term-limits idea, in contrast, is obviously crafted to undo the effect of Democrats losing the 2016 election and handing Donald Trump three Supreme Court appointments. (The Left wasn’t agitating for terms limits when the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who joined the Court in 1993, had already served more than 20 years — they were cheering her on.)

 

No one is going to have more trust in the Court after it’s been kneecapped for partisan purposes. If the Romans created a desert and called it peace, the Democrats want to blow up the Court and call it restored.

 

The Court-packing scheme is another way station in Biden’s sad slide left. Years ago, he spoke in harsh terms of FDR’s attempted Court-packing — also sold as a reform to freshen up the composition of the Court. Roosevelt had been “corrupted by power,” according to Biden. Then, he evaded the pressure from the Left to endorse Court-packing in 2020. Now, he’s buckled to his party’s progressive base, yet again.

 

But Biden has never paid the full political price for his leftward lurch. Until he pushed it too far, this is where Biden’s age helped him. It was hard to look at a frail old man who talked of being a working-class kid from Scranton and conclude that he was a radical. As a woke progressive from Oakland, Calif., Kamala Harris doesn’t have the same latitude.

 

Her promise to destroy a pillar of our government won’t help moderate her image.

 

Democrats are willing to do anything to address Donald Trump’s supposed threat to our norms and institutions, except honor those things themselves. Between Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s multiple lawless unilateral acts, they’ve done more than their part to normalize executive overreach. By never truly accepting the results of the 2016 elections, they’ve contributed to the cycle of disputing the legitimacy of lost elections. By heedlessly opening the border, they’ve created precedent for ignoring unwelcome laws. By pursuing a strategy of lawfare against Trump, they’ve created the precedent for distorting the legal system to try to destroy a political opponent.

 

And now they are going after the Supreme Court for the offense of issuing rulings that they don’t like — rulings, by the way, that may be flawed but are well reasoned according to a transparent, consistent theory of constitutional interpretation.

 

The conservative justices, sticklers for the details and history of the law, are the opposite of everything the Democrats dislike about Donald Trump. That doesn’t matter, though, since the Left isn’t opposed to Trumpism so much as anything that stands in the way of the unchecked implementation of its progressive vision.

 

The most fruitful line of attack against Biden was that he was old, incompetent, and a bad president. The best line of attack against Harris is that she’s a radical. By endorsing Court-packing, she’s offering fresh evidence for the indictment.