They know the media won’t make them — and they need to hide their radical agenda.
They know the media won’t make them — and they need to hide their radical agenda.
—W hat I found most striking about last night’s vice-presidential debate was the contrast between how objectively outrageous it is that the Biden-Harris ticket will not answer the court-packing question and how unabashedly, even glibly, they go about insulting our intelligence while demurring.
It is inconceivable that Republican candidates could get away with such smugness, even on issues of far less consequence. Here, we are talking about blowing up any semblance of the Supreme Court’s role in our Constitution’s separation-of-powers equilibrium as the non-political branch that decides issues of great importance in accordance with the law, not partisan or ideological considerations.
To be sure, the Court has done grave damage to itself in this regard. For a half-century, in cases involving the Kulturkampf or implicating constitutionally dubious “progressive” legislation, the Court has acted as a super-legislature. Its liberal members vote as a bloc, shredding — er, I mean, “evolving” — the law as they lock in the desired result, then reason backwards. That said, implicit in the justices’ recent grappling over stare decisis — the presumption in favor of adherence to precedent, even when the precedent is arguably wrong — is a self-awareness that the legitimacy of their institution demands fidelity to something besides sheer political will.
Court-packing would douse these last rule-of-law embers. It would be an unambiguous, despotic act of directing the judiciary to decide cases politically — and, naturally, in accordance with the political preferences of the radicals who expanded the bench for that explicit purpose.
And that would just be the start of the radical coup, not the end.
The Court may not be packed with four to six more Lawyer-Left stalwarts unless Democrats, while maintaining control of the House, take control of the Senate then end the filibuster. That would mean legislation could thenceforth be enacted by simple majority, with no minority rights to block it. If that were done, the entire Democratic Party agenda could be imposed with the signature of the new Democratic administration.
That’s the agenda Joe Biden and Kamala Harris avoid talking about with all the determination of their taboo on court-packing discussions. They know how jaw-dropping it would be for a majority of Americans, so they put on the airs of substance-free, pragmatic progressive moderates. When called on their records — whether the issue is outlawing private health insurance, banning fracking, implementing the Green New Deal, raising taxes on the middle class, appeasing America’s enemies, or laboring for three years to overturn the result of the last election — they deny, deny, deny.
Why do they do this? Because they are sympathetic to the radical Left. They believe, with good reason, that they need the energy of the radical Left to get elected. They understand that balancing act: They will have to accommodate the radical Left to some degree once in office . . . and if they do that a hair too much, their time in office will be short.
But mainly they remain mum because they know they can get away with it. They know the media, which would hound a Republican non-stop over the most mundane political dodges, or even hound them over ground already trod again and again — Have you condemned white supremacy in the last ten minutes? Yes or No! — will not challenge them in a serious way.
For two straight 90-minute debates, it’s been comical to watch Vice President Biden and Senator Harris not answer the court-packing question. Biden did it peremptorily, on the patently ludicrous rationale that, if he answered the question, it would become an issue. (Note how confident he is that, if he doesn’t answer the question, the media will prevent it from becoming an issue.) Harris tried the smooth-talk approach — Okay, let’s talk court-packing . . . and then blather on about courts but not about packing them — but she is no Obama, so it came off as amateur hour.
Note, however, that Biden and Harris have employed what should be futile stratagems with a decent amount of success: It’s been three weeks now, and they still haven’t had to answer. Why? Because only Republicans and conservatives are pressing the question. Mainstream journalists have not pushed the issue at the debates or on the campaign trail.
Again, we are not talking about run-of-the-mill media lifelines to Democrats who parade in black-face, hold high positions in the KKK, lie about their military records, lie about their academic records, plagiarize their way through speeches, grope their staffers (and worse, and worse still), etc. Eliminating the filibuster as a prelude to packing the Supreme Court and much else would usher in a wholesale transformation of the way we are governed and regulated, and of what remains of our fundamental rights — speech, worship, self-defense, assembly, property, privacy, due process.
Yet the media won’t ask them about it. Won’t badger them about it.
Interestingly, while the media-Democrat complex will protect Biden and Harris from answering hard questions from the right, the Marxist Left is another story.
As Politico reports today, that crowd — “Black Lives Matter leaders, organized labor, progressive groups and members of the House Democratic ‘Squad’” — has just rolled out the Working Families Party’s “People’s Charter.” The agenda is what you’d expect: defunding police, complete government takeover of health care, universal child care, cancellation of student debt, urbanization of the suburbs, 16 million taxpayer-subsidized jobs, forced unionization, universal $15 minimum wage, public ownership stakes in private businesses, a buy-out of oil and gas companies to usher in the Green New Deal, wealth taxes, crushing business taxes, and so on.
Unlike conservatives and Republicans, radical leftists won’t be ignored by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who need them. And unlike the media, radical leftists will press their questions and expect answers, which — Hey, nice Portland you’ve got here — damn well better be the answers they want to hear.—