A rant follows. Which doesn’t mean it’s untrue.
Democrats have now taken the next step in their plan to consolidate single-party rule in America. In concert with Joe Biden’s announcement of a commission to “study” the question of packing the Supreme Court, some of Congress’ less-grounded members announced they would present a bill to add four new justices and term-limit the rest. It will go nowhere; even if most Democrats in Congress vote for it, there are sufficient numbers in both houses aware of the fatal optics of the move to assure that. But in 180 days, Biden’s commission can point to its ideas as indication that Court-packing is an appropriate topic for discussion. This sort of bootstrapping is necessary when there is overwhelming public resistance to one’s ideas – which must nevertheless be brought to fruition, come what may.
Understand that this is court-packing, not “reform.” Reform is recommending changes to the calendar or the rules governing referral back without comment. “Reform” is also something undertaken by the Court itself, not something imposed by another, supposedly co-equal and independent branch of government. Understand that this proposal is not caused by Donald Trump, who nominated the number of justices he was constitutionally allowed, following constitutionally-mandated procedures. The court does not need “unpacking,” a looney term used by Rep. Adam Schiff who spent so much of the past four years lying that he apparently can no longer recognize anything even approaching fact.
No, the Democrats’ court-packing proposal is exactly that, forged in rage and frustration over the Bad Orange Man’s having been able to nominate three justices, and powered by their unquenchable lust for power, specifically for the ability to control all three branches of the Federal government so that their command will be without brake or limit.
It’s a brilliant, if evil plan. If it succeeds there will be nothing to stop presidential rule-by-fiat, consolidation of oligopolistic power by authoritarian Democrats and their monopolist cronies, and the imposition of crushing administrative rules on all save a favored and well-heeled or well-connected few. Think Jeff Bezos and Hunter Biden, two icons of the new regime…
Even if it fails, public confidence in one of the few remaining traditional institutions of the Republic will be shaken. In the campaign to pack the court that public confidence will be a primary target. Because the tradition of nine justices, like all other longstanding traditions in our self-governing society, must be ground to dust before the glittering socialist paradise promised by our would-be overlords can be called into being in the dazzling light of the eternal now.
That said, the plan poses dangers for Democrats. The last time it was proposed, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, it resulted in public repudiation and disgust. FDR, too, called it “judicial reform,” but no one save the most ardent Roosevelt fanboys was fooled. Even the New York Times called it “Too clever. Too clever by half.” And in the election of 1938 Democrats lost 72 seats in the House and seven in the Senate. “Too clever by half” precipitated a rout, which is why Nancy Pelosi has announced that she will not bring this Schiff Show to the floor.
But in the end her attitude will change because the America-hating ultra-left wing of the Democrat party now has the bit in its teeth and is charging hell-for-leather toward a one-party state. This has been the ultimate desideratum of the party’s far left for over a hundred years, since the early “Progressives” decided that a narrow intellectual elite knew better than average Americans how their lives should be lived. Call them “the vanguard of the revolution,” as did Vladimir Lenin, one of the world’s better-known “Democratic Socialists.”
Whatever their title, they believe permanent power to be within their grasp so they are now redoubling their efforts to smash our Republic and raise a new Utopia on its wreckage. They will resort to any tactic to achieve their ends. They will lie. They will cheat. They will threaten, cajole, suborn, mischaracterize. Do you doubt it? Then recall that when asked during the campaign, Joe Biden rejected court-packing when asked by CNN affiliate WKRC during the past campaign. He repeated that sentiment several times afterward.
They will resort to the ad hominem attack and the emotional appeal. “Jim Crow on steroids” is not an appropriate description of a law that requires voters to prove who they are before exercising the franchise. And in the end, if obstacles or objections remain, they will whistle up the mob for some violence and chaos.
If any of this feels familiar, it should. It is the common playbook for tyrants, and we are now in the last few pages. Unless there is powerful, universal and sustained pushback, the Republic – which has enlarged the scope of human freedom more than any other nation in the history of the world – is lost.
And we will miss it keenly when it is murdered by those who profess only to have our best interests at heart.
