Thread by @JewhadiTM

The Democrats Are Flirting with the Destruction of the Judiciary nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-de…

“Today, every instance in which Democrats are denied a political victory is immediately transformed into a national “crisis” in which the public has “lost faith” in a system that worked perfectly fine when they were in power.

Not that long ago, self-interest was a motivation for defending deliberative politics and republican order. But these days, undeterred by reality, partisans have convinced themselves they’ll be in power forever.

It’s not merely the progressive fringe that demands Democrats blow up the courts. It is the partisan, self-proclaimed defenders of “norms.”

In @TheAtlantic, the leading periodical of intellectual anti-constitutionalism, @lawfareblog’s @qjurecic and @Susan_Hennessey argue “if Republicans continue the smash-and-grab approach to confirming Barrett,” court-packing “may be the only way for Democrats to save the Court.”

The duly elected president and the duly elected Senate are observing the constitutionally stipulated guidelines for placing a highly qualified jurist on the Court. Someone will need to do a better job of explaining how dismantling the Court will “save” it.

Now, perhaps if you’ve lost the ability to differentiate between ends and means, the idea makes intuitive sense to you.

Perhaps you nod along as Biden spuriously argues that #ACB’s nomination is nothing more than the exploitation of a “loophole” to undo the Affordable Care Act, ignoring the fact that we don’t know how she’ll rule on the Obamacare lawsuit.

(and the fact that either way, Obamacare isn’t some untouchable edict handed down from Mount Sinai). But back here in the real world, we know that court-packing would be far more destructive to our political order than anything Trump has done, Barrett’s nomination included.

The notion that the Senate shouldn’t confirm Trump’s nominee because Biden might win the election or Trump lost the “popular vote” is highly dubious. Justices do not need the consent of the majority, nor should they seek it.

As Clark Neily, the VP for criminal justice at the Cato Institute, recently noted, some of the Supreme Court’s “most reviled cases—including Dred Scott (slavery), Plessy (separate-but-equal), and Buck v Bell (eugenics)—involved acceding to democratically enacted policies.

I can think of no higher compliment to pay a judge than to characterize her as antidemocratic.”

And that’s if Democrats take the charge seriously, which all evidence suggests they don’t:

Remember, they had no problem with this “anti-democratic” institution when it was creating constitutional rights to gay marriage and abortion. It only becomes a problem for them when it threatens to defend the Bill of Rights.”