“Consider a country where a leader is elected in a free and fair election and then sets about chipping away slowly but surely at the pillars of democracy,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a recent speech in Ecuador. “Now, imagine that leader then seeks to use the levers of democracy to pass anti-democratic reforms — eliminating term limits, packing courts, firing legislators. That’s the story of more than one democracy in our hemisphere. And it’s one of the ways that democracies can come undone.”
Blinken is right, which is awkward for his boss, President Joe Biden, whose panel pondering the merits and methods for packing the Supreme Court has just finished its inglorious work.
The Left, enraged that former President Donald Trump got to appoint three Supreme Court justices, is clamoring to undermine the Constitution in precisely the way Biden’s State Department rightly condemns. And as Biden repeatedly makes clear, he’ll give the Left whatever it wants.
The United States derives its great wealth and power not simply from its natural resources and modern technology, but from its adherence to the rule of law. By even discussing packing the Supreme Court, the president undermines judicial independence upon which the rule of law depends.
It was good to see Biden’s court-packing commission dissolve this month without endorsing banana-republic moves to help the Left. But such a panel should never have been convened. The Supreme Court isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing. The unilaterally partisan act of creating additional vacant seats and filling them with hand-picked allies — this is the true definition of court-packing despite whatever manipulative and partisan attempts are made to redefine it — is how judicial independence is destroyed.
Some things are properly beyond the pale in political discussion, which is something Democrats understood when Trump was president. They repeatedly attacked him for breaking norms. But now that they’re in power, they’re proving to be worse than he was. They assail every constitutional and legal check on their own power. They were the ones who abolished judicial filibusters, after deploying them to block former President George W. Bush’s nominees, and they are now threatening the legislative filibuster as well.
Democrats increasingly demand to change the rules when they’re losing the game. They don’t believe in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, or the Seventh Amendment. We’d better look further, for we suspect the entire Bill of Rights is in their sights one way or another.
Many on the Left are totalitarian in instinct. They regard those who disagree with them as stupid or evil, which is why they relish cancel culture. They have lost perspective and self-reflection.
They no longer care about procedures or safeguards. They have no problems storming people’s houses over political disagreements or with sending the FBI to violate the rights of parents who speak out at school board meetings.
If Democrats keep winning elections, it’ll be only a matter of time before the future of our republic hinges on the most unhinged people in the room.
