Democrats feared in 2018 that the addition of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in place of Anthony Kennedy would disrupt the balance of the entire judiciary. They took action accordingly.
This is why they chose to believe and spread foul allegations that were not only uncorroborated but, in most cases, not even plausible that Kavanaugh was a gang rapist and that decades ago, as a teenager, he had assaulted a girl, even though there is still no evidence that the two of them ever met.
For the most part, the question of whether one believed the allegations had nothing to do with the quality of evidence — there was none — and everything to do with one’s desires for the eventual outcome.
Democrats were wrong about Kavanaugh’s effect on the court, but the real and claimed issues at stake in his ugly confirmation process shed light on what is happening now.
When you hear Democrats argue that the Senate and President Trump should not undertake their constitutional role of filling a vacant Supreme Court seat, know the reason. It has nothing to do with law, precedent, constitutionality, or propriety. And once Trump has chosen a nominee, it will have nothing to do with that person’s quality, personality, history, temperament, or qualifications.
Rather, it will have everything to do with abortion and then, beyond that, the desire among Democrats to advance a broader leftist agenda through the courts, including everything from destroying the gig economy in order to help unions to providing effectively unlimited regulatory power to the federal government.
To those on the Left, a conservative Supreme Court means their worldview and agenda, which they see as the only appropriate course along which the nation can progress, will be stopped in its tracks. To them, such a development would be almost like history running backward in time. They aren’t about to put up with it — not without a fight.
This is why you can ignore the Democrats’ stated objections about procedure, precedent, propriety, and the like. They are just going through the motions when they raise these losing arguments about something voters don’t care about anyway. They are, in fact, raising these as a disguise, an excuse, for waging a struggle that wholly and ruthlessly ideological.
The arguments against the specific potential nominees, especially Amy Coney Barrett, whose Christian faith is supposedly offensive to some lawmakers, will not be serious and should not be taken as such. The real issue is that Democrats do not want another Trump nominee on the court. They would prefer not to undertake the politically difficult task of packing the court with an additional four justices to restore a clear liberal majority. It is easier, partly because it comes so much more naturally to them, to traduce a decent, indeed outstanding, individual than to impose a restructuring on the judicial branch that is so outlandish that the public would probably greet it with skepticism bordering on disgust.
Democrats want to derail and delay the process of replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They want Joe Biden to fill it with a judge who will take a choose-your-own-Constitution approach to jurisprudence. They want a judge who will take it upon himself or herself to settle contentious political and social debates rather than just legal issues.
An ugly political fight lies ahead, a struggle for the future that will probably involve ludicrous accusations and the outright defamation of an as-yet-unnamed nominee. Do not get lost in the details, and do not fall for the Democrats’ excuses for dragging the national conversation into the gutter just ahead of the 2020 election.
