The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

Progressives in orbit

Amy Coney Barrett in 2018 (Seventh Circuit Court)

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett has launched a fleet of progressives into orbit from where, high above we mere mortals, they see the demise of democracy.

The crew aboard the Washington Post orbiter includes E.J. Dionne Jr. who, in all seriousness, nay in a virtual panic, warns that “The Supreme Court struggle is about democracy.” He puffs:

Allowing President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to complete a judicial coup and install a 6-to-3 conservative majority will be, in both form and substance, a triumph for anti-democratic forces and anti-democratic thinking.

The best that I can figure out, he argues that democracy is endangered because the court might make conservative decisions that progressives oppose. They’ll “wreck unions, gut voting rights, tie the hands of regulators and empower plutocrats by voiding laws limiting money’s role in politics.” Well, that’s the straw man agenda that progressives want everyone to believe that conservatives desire.

Jennifer Rubin, also writing in the Washington Post breathlessly warns of the end of days in “The unmaking of the Supreme Court:”

It will simply be the starting gun in a race to dismantle the Supreme Court as we know it.Remember that the agenda for the right on the Supreme Court is to subvert overwhelmingly popular policies, such as access to legalized abortion. As soon as the Supreme Court strikes it down, Congress could pass a bill enshrining it in law, albeit after unrooting the filibuster.

Oh, Jennifer, you mean that Congress could, or even should, legislate on the matter? Exactly what so many conservatives said should have happened in the first place instead of by a Supreme Court fiat in Roe v. Wade.

The reality is that Democrats have already dismantled the Supreme Court when they politicized it by turning it into a legislative body to enact policies that they couldn’t enact in Congress. In began with the Democrats “Borking” Robert Bork. Read: “Robert Bork’s Proud Legacy and the Senate’s Shameful One: His defeat taught interest groups to demonize judicial nominees based solely on their worldview.”

America has endured decades, if not generations, of progressives making law from the bench, yet we have survived. Disagreeing with policies is not a threat to democracy. It is democracy. And in a democracy, the legislative chamber is where such disagreements should be settled. Not in the courts. That’s what Barrett and conservatives believe and it is not extremism and the end of democracy. It is a return to democracy.