Victor Davis Hanson
9. Packing the Court. Did the Right ever wish to pack the 16-year-long liberal Warren Court? Did it ever seek to harass, demonize, or swarm the homes of the justices? What would happen to a Democrat-nominated justice who swung rightwing in the manner that lots of Republican-appointed justices went leftward and hard left at times: e.g., Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Earl Warren; and those who went from right-wing to center-right or centrist: Warren Burger, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts.
Did any Senate majority or minority leader ever, like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in 2020, lead a mob to the very doors of the court to threaten the justices by name?
Do we remember his threats? “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Could a direct physical threat to the two justices be any clearer, especially at the head of a frenzied pro-abortion throng assembled at the very doors of the Court in session inside?
Did in the past assassins show up at the homes of the justices, as happened in the case of Kavanaugh?
The last time the Left sought to pack a court, their own representatives did not like the gambit, and it ended in humiliation and defeat. And FDR never quite got over the stain of demagoguery when even his own party bolted at his “Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937,” which sought to increase the court to 15 justices, demand mandatory retirements at 70, and otherwise intimidate the court.
Again, no matter. Now the Left has resurrected such schemes and hopes to win the presidency and a congressional majority to push the partisan recalibration through, given it is now outnumbered on the court in theory 6-3, although many conservative justices have joined the leftwing majority in a manner rare in reverse.
There are various versions of the scheme. But mostly the Left wants term limits applied retroactively to eject Republican justices. They want a “binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court” aimed supposedly at conservatives presently on the bench but ignoring past leftist judges’ behaviors.
And some plans demand 15 justices or more in the spirit of FDR’s failed scheme. Note that the nine-justice court (which is not described in the Constitution) has been steady since 1869, in reaction to prior partisan administrations constantly changing the number of justices to weaponize the Court and get favorable majorities.
The Left screams that the Court is anti-democratic because it often rules against Democrats’ efforts to Jacobinize the system and create a “living” and “fluid” Constitution to reflect progressive “enlightenment.” Again, when the Supreme Court radically changed the country in the 1960s by virtually replacing the Congress and issuing edicts and fiats undreamed of by the Founders, the Left canonized the justices, and the Right made no move to change the terms or size of the court or changes to its rules and procedures.
In sum, when the Court had a 6-3 liberal majority, the Left loved the present system and the nine-justice court; when it lost that majority and could not flip Republican justices completely, it whined and now tries to change the rules—in line with the dangerous but still adolescent mind of the Left.
10. Admitting New States. Admitting new states to the Union fueled the Civil War, given the pro-slavery/anti-slavery contentions of the 1840s and 1850s and the effort to use new admittees to ensure slavery.
But more recently as a general rule, when political disputes arose, the Congress sought to admit one conservative state and one more liberal to achieve balance, to avoid the appearance that any one party was rigging the process of admission. Thus Alaska, deemed a conservative state, came in near simultaneously with Hawaii, an assumed liberal state.
Not now with the new radical Jacobin Left.
It wishes to contravene the Constitution and change the District of Columbia into a separate, hard-left city-state—along with admitting leftwing Puerto Rico, a state whose language is officially not English!
That way the Left achieves its goal of an automatic four-senator gain. (Do we see the pattern here: given the unpopularity of the leftwing agenda, the Left either destroys the border and imports voters, or runs false campaigns in which leftists pose for 180 days as “moderates,” or seeks to change/rig the system?)
If the Left got its way and rammed through two more leftwing states, then we would see a right countermove to break up big leftwing states, such as a hard new right “North California” or “North New York” or “South Illinois” or “East Washington” and “East Oregon,” thereby greenlighting two more Republican senators for each new admission.
And the end result? A 100, 200, 300 city-state America? Endlessly fragmenting to please demagogues?
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>Fifteen Ways to Destroy Democracy to “Save It”—Democrat-Style: Part Five appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.