Timothy Birdnow

Reading Mollie Ziegler Hemingway's essay Trump's Kavanaugh Apology Showed True Presidential Leadership it occurred to me that the Democrats have seriously damaged confidence in the courts, especially the Supreme Court. Talk of an "asterisk" beside Kavanaugh's name, for instance, makes people doubt the virtue of an unelected person having the kind of power the Democrats have sought for the courts. They may seriously regret having vilified Kavanaugh, and by extension the entire SCOTUS.

Oh, and by the way, what is this "asterisk" nonsense? Nothing is different about Kavanaugh than any other Associate Justice. This is, of course, a sports metaphor; a record in a short season, for instance, gets an asterisk. So too does the use of performance enhancers; Mark McGuire, the famous Cardinals home run titan, has such an asterisk since it turns out his home run record was purchased with pharmaceuticals. But you can stick whatever modifying glyph you please, but in the end Brett Kavanaugh's rulings and reasoning will have an immediate effect and will be used by future Courts, and tough toenails to the liberals who want to somehow impeach his credibility. Future SCOTUS Justices are not going to ignore him based on a bunch of crybabies who won't accept his being on the Court.

And it's not like Kavanaugh is being rejected for his legal reasoning or whatnot. It's over an accusation stemming from a completely unverifiable incident when he was a high schooler. That and the fact he got mad when he was accused of being a would-be rapist by his opponents in the Senate as a last-ditch effort to keep him off the Court.

The fact is, Kavanagh would have sailed right through if he wasn't going to be the swing vote. He'd have had an easier time of it than Neil Gorsuch, who came through largely unscathed because the Dems weren't willing to die on that particular hill. They had to wait until it REALLY mattered, then try to destroy a man to save their power.

But did they? In point of fact this is going to reduce the power of the Supreme Court and likely all other courts.

Alexander Hamilton said that the Supreme Court was the weakest branch of government because it had no enforcement powers of it's own, and no money. SCOTUS derives all of it's power from moral authority and from the power given it by the other branches of government. During the Obama era President Obama routinely ignored court rulings - especially lower court rulings - that got in his way. He could do this because he knew the GOP wouldn't hold him accountable out of fear of being seen attacking the first black President, and he knew the courts couldn't stop him for lack of actual power.

For example, Obama ignored the Fifth Circuit ruling against his policy of amnetizing illegal aliens. He also ignored a SCOTUS ruling and went after Texas for requiring voter identification. He told SCOTUS to go jump in the lake over affirmative action, ordering colleges to use race as a basis for admissions despite the Court ruling against him. He simply ignored a subpoena to appear in a Georgia courts over eligibility questions. He ignored court rulings against secret wiretapping and instructed the FISA courts to continue the program.

There are many more examples of Obama following the law only when it was convenient.

Now the Left is going to demand that SCOTUS be ignored because of Kavanaugh. Well, I won't complain overmuch at that; it will be deuced difficult to reinstate the kind of reverence the Left needed for the Court in order to use it to advance their nefarious agenda. remember, abortion was created from whole cloth by the Court. There was never a vote by the public. Ditto gay marriage. Ditto school busing. And if the courts are to be ignored, then two can play at that game.

So the Left may well have outsmarted themselves with this Kavanagh temper tantrum. It's mighty difficult to put that mushroom cloud back in that shiny uranium sphere....

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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