Originalism, like “free market” economic doctrines, seems like little more than an elaborate mystification of power — a way for reactionaries to insulate their unpopular goals from democratic challenge by casting those aims as dictates foisted upon them by some distant agency...
So, *I*, a conservative ideologue in a robe am not voting to overturn a democratically enacted health reform, I’m simply carrying out The Constitution’s orders...
And *we* — elected and appointed office holders — are not choosing to funnel wealth upward through a particular set of tax, monetary and labor policies; impartial market forces are simply valorizing natural hierarchies of merit.
But “the coin don’t have no say; it’s just you.”
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1) If I believed that abortion was genocide and that the Clean Air Act was the first step on the road to Stalinism, then I would want McConnell to handle things exactly as he has. But once we drop the pretense of an apolitical judiciary...
2)...Democrats have no obligation to let the timing of various deaths + the biases of Senate and Electoral College award Republicans a high court supermajority for a decade -- despite the fact that their party has lost the popular vote in 6 of 7 presidential elections...
3) And the idea that they are obligated to honor the right's fortuitous triumph is all the more absurd when one considers the profound unpopularity of the conservative judicial agenda (not least on corporate power) and the audacity of the modern right's judicial activism...
Virtually no one has a strong, context-neutral opinion on whether a candidate who enters the convention with a plurality of delegates should automatically get the nomination *no matter how small that plurality is.*
In a world where Mike Bloomberg got 30% of the vote, Bernie got 28%, and Warren got 23%, very few Sanders supporters would denounce the idea of Warren delegates putting Bernie over the top on a 2nd ballot as an affront to democracy.
The stakes of political conflict are too high -- and the theory of procedural justice in this circumstance too arbitrary -- for anyone to prioritize principle over outcome. (Fortunately, Bernie appears on track to win a large plurality, so this prob won't matter).