America Could Use a “Rubber Stamp” for a Battered Constitution

Neil Gorsuch vowed independence at his confirmation hearing for becoming a Supreme Court justice, saying he won’t be “rubber stamp” for Donald Trump, Republicans or anyone else.

Who could disagree? You want a Supreme Court justice to be independent. The President and Congress have no control over how a Supreme Court justice rules, once he or she sits on the bench for life. That’s the whole point of having an independent judiciary, apart from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

However, there’s one problem: Leftist and Democratic judges are predictable, unyielding, and absolutist in their consistency of being a rubber stamp for all things leftist. By “leftist” I mean anything that increases government power, particularly federal government power, at the expense of individual rights, or the rights of states to legislate matters not enumerated in the Constitution.

Leaving aside the odd exceptions of abortion and gay marriage, leftist judges stand unified in the increase of government power over individual rights at every turn. They virtually always rule in favor of the expansion of government power, including in areas involving the First and Second Amendments. If we ever get a leftist, Democratic majority on the court, you can literally kiss the Second Amendment good-bye, and most likely the First Amendment, too. The Obama administration made very clear its intense dislike of those two freedoms, and since the election of Donald Trump we’ve seen Democrats act like raging totalitarians.

When you get a conservative judge, on the other hand, it’s not always so clear what will happen. Usually they will lean toward less government control over individual rights in favor of personal liberty – once again, leaving aside the odd exceptions for abortion and gays, two areas where conservatives generally remain firm. But conservatives will surprise you far more often than Democratic leftist justices. Sometimes they will favor federal government control at the expense of individual liberty and private enterprise. The biggest and most recent example? Chief Justice John Roberts. A conservative judge with a conservative record appointed by Republican George W. Bush, Roberts cast the deciding vote in favor of leaving Obamacare in place, back in 2012. To this day we’re still stuck with Obamacare, and the Republican Congress and President Trump clearly have no intention of getting rid of it, other than in a symbolic gesture of a “repeal” that isn’t really a repeal.

My point? Leftist decisions in favor of more government control over the individual have a way of sticking. That’s why we really do need “rubber stamp” justices on the Supreme Court when it comes to upholding the original limited government aspects of the Constitution. Social Security and Medicare were, at one time, just as controversial among Republicans as Obamacare supposedly is today. Yet they’re with us forever. Ditto for things like the federal Department of Education. Over time, federal government power has grown way beyond the boundaries of the original U.S. Constitution. While conservatives always promise us justices who will consistently uphold that Constitution, there’s no guarantee we’ll get that. Democrats, on the other hand, like their Communist ancestors, are utterly and unequivocally predictable. We’ve got to have some sort of firewall against them, if we’re to hold onto even our fading remnants of liberty and individual rights in America.

Here’s hoping Neil Gorsuch is as stalwart and unyielding in limited government thinking as his leftist adversaries are in the opposite direction. America’s battered Constitution desperately needs a rubber stamp in its defense … and soon!