The previous few weeks raise some interesting questions; among them being what is likely to transpire when the next conservative judge is nominated to the court?
The precedent set here is a derivative of what happened to Judges Bork and Thomas during their nomination hearing. It’s worth remembering that at no time did the Republicans engage in ad hominum attacks on any of the Clinton or Obama nominations to the high court. On the contrary, objections were invariably couched in terms of respect for the individual, but objections to their judicial perspectives. That is decidedly not what happened with regard to Bork, Thomas or Kavanaugh. The next “conservative” nominee – that is, someone with a strict interpretation of the Constitution vice someone who views the Constitution’s meaning as one that changes with the current fashion – will be heralded by the democrats as dangerously “tilting” the Court and therefore someone that must be stopped. They might well add “at any cost.”
I’m not sure what would “up the ante” after the insanity of the past few weeks, but it certainly doesn’t bode well for the next nominee.
This speaks to a larger problem: the progressives / democrats have established a set of rules that simply don’t exist outside of their world view: the court must be “balanced.” But take a look at FDR’s court; by the middle of 1941 only one judge on the Court had not been appointed by FDR. In the summer of 1945 the last Republican appointed judge resigned and from 1945 to 1954 the court was staffed completely with FDR and Truman appointees. As President Obama noted: “elections have consequences.
He might have added that that’s the point of a democracy. And why we have a Bill of Rights.
But the Progressives wish to establish all sorts of new rules. Leading democrats in Congress have spoken repeatedly of redefining elements within the Bill of Rights so as to, in fact, limit those rights. One leading democrat has spoken repeatedly of narrowly defining who is a member of the press; if you don’t fit the definition, freedom of the press wouldn’t apply to you. If you’re a blogger, for example, you wouldn’t have the same freedom as does someone writing for the mainstream media.
I wonder when the idea will occur to them to try to make freedom of the press apply only to those who actually own a printing press.
I also wonder how the tech giants of Silicon Valley will play in these efforts. How far are they willing to go to support the progressives? Might they start mining all the data they have on all of us and start to isolate us, each from the other, in support of their political idols in Washington?
If this seems far-fetched, consider that in China the government recently established that they’ve the authority to extract any data they want from Internet service providers. Even as they establish a comprehensive, cyber-driven, full-time surveillance, police state. The capability exists; the question is who will exploit it? (If you haven’t read the latest articles on the ongoing cyber war, China has been infiltrating microchips into systems across the US – for years. The threat is both internal and external.)
The long and short is that the West, Western thought, freedom of the individual and limited government, is under assault – from without and from within.
In the sixteenth century the Catholic church was weakened by a host of problems, Christianity seemed to be crumbling, the Reformation was sweeping across Europe, the kingdoms of Europe were each wracked by a host of internal problems: economic, demographic, political and social. And the Ottomans were surging. In 1570 they invaded Cyprus, as a precursor to further expansion into the west. Pope Pius V was able to cobble together an alliance and on October 7th, 1571 an allied fleet, under overall command of Don John of Austria, defeated the Ottoman fleet under Ali Pasha. In the end, the Ottomans retained Cyprus, but their expansion west was halted, Europe had time to recover from the chaos of the Reformation, and the West survived.
The lessons are many, but the question remains: as the West struggles through another period of incredible stress, which seems to threaten the very foundations of Western thought, who will cobble together the alliance that will push back those threats? That is really what the vote next month will try to answer.
Copyright 2018 Arrias
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