The Left Cares More about Getting What It Wants Than It Cares about ‘Norms’

A s Democrats publicly flirt with all manner of ideas about how to exercise power they have yet to attain — ranging from the believable to the nakedly partisan and self-destructive — it’s worth remembering that the American Left has never been shy about wanting to change all sorts of rules when our system of government does not serve their political interests.

There are of course the famous historical examples. Democratic dreams of filling the Supreme Court with justices sympathetic to their agenda did not begin after Donald Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the bench. FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court after it struck down parts of his New Deal. Thankfully, leaders in both parties, including Roosevelt’s own vice president, John Nance Garner, opposed and successfully thwarted the power grab. But there are many more elaborate and recent instances of “creative” Democratic thinking that merit mentioning.

Court-packing is only one component of the Left’s assault on Article III of the Constitution. In the House of Representatives, Representatives Ro Khanna and Joe Kennedy III have put forward a bill that would limit Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms. No one found lifetime appointments problematic when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appointed two justices each, but now that three seats have opened up during Donald Trump’s first term, they are of great concern. Per Khanna, “we can’t face a national crisis every time a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court.” Of course, we only ever seem to face a “crisis” when a Republican president fills a vacancy.

Article I also needs revision to suit the Democrats’ needs. One idea that has traction among the liberal intelligentsia is abolishing the Senate — that is, half of the supreme branch of our government. At Vox, Jonathan M. Ladd writes that “the Senate gives a big advantage to voters in small states, because every state gets an equal number of Senators.” Well yes, that is kind of the point. Many compromises were reached in 1787 at the constitutional convention, but the only one that earned the moniker of “the Great Compromise” was Roger Sherman’s proposal that the House of Representatives would have proportional representation while the Senate would protect the interests of smaller states with equal representation. This was the compact under which the original states formed the Union and it is the compact under which 37 more states have joined. It’s also an arrangement that merited no reconsideration in 2009, when Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate with which they could enact their agenda without meaningful protest. Only since Republicans defended the upper chamber for the third straight cycle in 2018 have progressive thinkers begun to call the Senate an undemocratic institution. What they really mean is that it’s un-Democratic.

If the Senate must persist, though, former president Barack Obama insists that the legislative filibuster be done away with. In fact, in a July eulogy for John Lewis, Obama — anticipating a Biden presidency and narrow Democratic majority in the Senate after November — called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.” In another life, Senator Obama of Illinois had no problem with using that relic to delay Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. But with the polls favoring his party, the time has come to rid the country of this bigoted albatross.

But the theories and strategies get even zanier than this. Take the reaction of Dahlia Lithwick, a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate, to Senate Republicans’ decision not to give Merrick Garland a hearing after President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court. She attributed their decision not to consent to Garland’s elevation from the D.C. Circuit to an “Insanity Gap” between the parties that causes Republicans “to throw away any sense of pride, integrity, or even long-term strategic thinking in favor of acting like toddlers having a tantrum next to a Snickers bar in the checkout line.” Lithwick, only half-kidding, suggested that the Senate’s decision not to consider Garland could have been interpreted as implicit approval of his nomination, and that he should have just walked into the Supreme Court and seated himself. I say half-kidding because while her piece’s subheading is “a modest proposal for how Merrick Garland can outfox Republican obstructionists,” she also says that “if you’re the law review type, here is a very plausible argument that this is actually the case.” It’s the constitutional version of “haha . . . just kidding . . . unless . . .”

The lunacy extends into the financial sphere as well. In 2011, when Republicans forced President Obama to agree to spending cuts before they raised the debt ceiling, the idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin and using that to finance the federal government’s debt was floated in a financial blog’s comments section. By 2013, it had become a mainstream idea promoted in the pages of Bloomberg, Business Insider, The Atlantic, and even by Representative Jerrold Nadler. Rather than accepting the consequences of divided government and negotiating, some Democrats preferred to fantasize over an idea that would expose the United States as politically dysfunctional and a financial paper tiger.

Every political party has its problems and cranks. For its part, the GOP is notable for being plagued with grifters and a small but damaging alt-right contingent. On the other hand, the Democrats are unique in their willingness to cavalierly toss aside rules, institutions, and even entire sections of the Constitution if those things stand in the way of their immediate goals. But it’s not just the party’s resident loons who embrace this mentality. It’s almost the entire staff at Vox, it’s Joe Kennedy III and Jerry Nadler, it’s even FDR and Barack Obama — the party’s two most popular presidents of the last century. For a party running on a return to normalcy, it’s a troubling track record. An insanity gap may exist, but it’s not the one Dahlia Lithwick believes in.