Some Constitution-lovers are disappointed by Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh’s prior, possible upholding of Obamacare’s legality. However, we have to keep perspective. Consider the kind of nominee Hillary Clinton would have picked. Unlike Democrats, Republicans would not have fought her picks. They never contested Obama’s.
If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, we’d have at least two and maybe several more appointments made by her! That would have been the end of America as we’ve known it, for sure.
Democrats pick haters of the Constitution – all the while mouthing their support for the Constitution. It’s beyond maddening. Yet it’s what they do, and they’re rewarded for it, as often as not. Fortunately they were not rewarded in 2014 and 2016, although they surely were in 2008 and 2012. Remember that, liberty lovers, before you get too complacent about the turning of the tide.
Republicans, including President Trump’s current appointment, tend to opt for judicial restraint. We have to be careful about judicial restraint. On the one hand, advocates of judicial restraint seek not to legislate from the bench. According to the original Constitution, the judicial branch and Supreme Court existed to interpret the law, not legislate. True enough.
However, what are you to do when so much legislation is bad?
Let’s take an obvious and easy example. Let’s say President Obama and the Congress had passed a law authorizing speech camps for people guilty of hate speech. Let’s say federal authorities seized the right to deem certain people as a threat to the government merely for what they write on the Internet or say elsewhere. It can’t happen in America? Look at the intolerant attitude of most of your leftist friends. It CAN happen here, and it will, if we let it.
Would it be proper for a Supreme Court justice to uphold the law in the name of judicial restraint? Would it be acceptable for the Court to say, as Chief Justice John Roberts did when faced with Obamacare, that if the American people don’t like this law, they’ll just have to elect different people?
Judicial restraint is not only worthless, but dangerous, when you’re up against the kind of laws that all Democrats and many Republicans seek to impose on us.
In the end, all that matters is the Constitution. Brett Kavenaugh will probably end up with a mixed record, as justices appointed by Republicans usually do. But the justices appointed by Democrats are not mixed. They are consistently, unflinchingly and unambiguously against the Constitution, every time they’re faced with it.
That’s a precedent we can live without. In that context, I welcome President Trump’s appointment to the Supreme Court, and I hope he ends up with two or three more, before it’s all over.
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