If you have friends of the Progressive persuasion, be kind to them. The past couple weeks have not been. It has been particularly painful for them to deal with the last few verdicts from the Supreme Court, on which they could formerly rely as an ally of last resort to accomplish their schemes of industrial concentration, government consolidation, the curtailment of liberties and the gathering of power into the pasty and palsied hands of Washington’s corrupt elites.
Thanks to the current court, constitutional principles are back in vogue – which must be particularly exasperating to progressive Democrats who for decades have insisted that it is a “living document” whose language can be tortured into confessing anything that fits their agenda. In contrast, this court sees a constitution whose words say what they say, neither more nor less. This is a severe impediment to leaders who think they can conjure money out of thin air, ignore legal contracts, disdain state governments, buy the votes of the young and stupid with other people’s money and otherwise act as though our country were an absolute monarchy instead of a constitutional republic – as Joe Biden was painfully reminded this week.
He was also reminded that even if it had been legal, using money taken from middle-class electricians, carpenters, pipefitters and diesel mechanics to pay the bills of lawyers, MBAs and Ph.D.s in Transgender Studies was never a sound idea.
Those political and academic elites throughout the country who thought it perfectly acceptable to adopt an easy racial paternalism toward college admissions were similarly reminded that to our constitution, racism is racism and that the 14th Amendment still bars unequal treatment of citizens in the plainest possible language. It doesn’t matter that ancient racially-based behaviors still exist among Democrats – the Party of Dixie and Jim Crow, of concentration camps and race-baiting, of division and perpetual conflict in pursuit of power. Nor that Progressive altruists simply seek to give a hand to their Little Brown Brothers who, they insist, are unable to accomplish tasks others have mastered without aid from their supremely moral white benefactors. It’s still unconstitutional and immoral to boot. If one wishes an end to racism, it won’t come about through perpetuating different treatment based on skin color. It will come about by ending it – as Chief Justice Roberts noted.
These decisions, and others to follow will, I’m fairly certain, give us a portrait of a Court that is founded in Constitutionalism and in what its language actually says. It will not be groping in the shadows nor divining for the document’s “emanations” to justify arriving at a decision attuned to the philosophical or political fashion of the day. As time goes on it will doubtless annoy factions of both Left and Right – more the former, since they have become accustomed to a court which is part of their intellectual universe and which more often than not helped them achieve goals they could not reach through legislation.
In truth, the more progressive Democrats howl about the “illegitimacy” of the current court’s decisions, the more they confirm that those decisions are a salubrious move from governance based on what they “feel” is right and necessary and toward what is reasonable in all senses of the word and experiential.
And that is an outcome most worthy of cheering. Well done.
