Sen. Chuck Schumer’s disgraceful recent threat against two Supreme Court justices was ironic, and it cast light on the Left’s anti-constitutional agenda, which we’ve discussed here at the Washington Examiner before.
Schumer, speaking to abortion industry brass outside the Supreme Court on March 4, warned Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they had “released the whirlwind,” would “pay the price,” and “won’t know what hit [them] if [they went] forward with these awful decisions.” The minority leader — long may he remain so — then dishonestly denied his words were a threat, and only finally apologized a day later.
But he’d committed a serious gaffe, which is what we call it when a politician accidentally speaks the truth. Schumer was trying tactically to undermine a co-equal branch of government within a wider strategy of actually giving judges more power, so long as they decide cases and principles he agrees with. If judges are compliant, the Left willingly siphons decision-making to them, beyond the reach of electoral democracy.
That way, Democrats can impose ideas on a public that dislikes them. That’s how we got abortion on demand, which the majority consistently opposes. It’s also how we got gay marriage, although opinion was shifting so fast that this could have been done democratically, through legislation, almost as soon.
Democrats are equally happy to drain congressional authority to the executive, with the same caveat: The president must be a Democrat. It was President Barack Obama’s avowedly unconstitutional executive orders that gave 11 million illegal immigrants the right to live in America, and unleashed an alien irruption across the southern border.
After our Super Tuesday blowout on domestic politics last week, we turn our eyes overseas to the appalling regional war in the Middle East. It’s raged for nearly a decade, but, as our cover story, “No End in Sight,” makes plain, it is intensifying, creating even more misery and showing no sign of abating.
We also examine the escalation of another war — the one in California against workers. It’s two months since state law effectively banned the gig economy, making it impossible to live there and work as, for example, a freelance journalist or a part-time taxi driver. California imposed restrictions that, like most restrictions on freedom, hurt the poorest members of society most. That’s another irony, of course. Democrats insist they’re on the side of the little guy, but they keep imposing regulations that help only their paymasters in organized union labor.
Mark Hemingway profiles the most interesting man in the world, Ken Schaffer, a Brooklyn nerd who revolutionized rock ‘n’ roll, opened a Cold War satellite window on the Soviet Union, and is now curing drug addicts electronically.
Columnist Timothy Carney identifies a key electoral weakness of Bernie Sanders; he has the support of the secularist Left, but Joe Biden’s sweep of the South showed that the socialist is repellent to people who go the church.
