Long Term Plans

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why the vicious fight over the Kavanaugh nomination? Because there’s so much at stake.

When the Constitution was written, the Supreme Court did not have the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. The Court grabbed that power in Marbury v. Madison, 1803.

For the first hundred years, everyone assumed the Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of the people who wrote it. If the public didn’t like what the original Constitution said, they could amend the Constitution as they did after the Civil War. The Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment extended the constitutional limitations on federal government action to state governments.

Starting in 1912, Woodrow Wilson promoted the idea that government must grow and develop, must evolve with the times but without Constitutional limitations and without going through the cumbersome formal Constitutional amendment process. The idea caught on with judges who liked the thought of being the ultimate guardians of good sense and civic virtue, a check on excesses of state legislatures, philosopher-kings. That’s how we got abortion-on-demand and gay marriage: Supreme Court justices decided the time was ripe for those new ‘rights’ to be discovered and imposed nation-wide. The four Liberal justices on the court are committed to this method of Constitutional interpretation. Whatever is popular today, is the law.

Kavanaugh follows the Original Intent method which, indeed, is the standard applied to every document in every lawsuit by every court except the Liberal justices. If your mortgage company wants to double your interest rate, the case will turn on what was intended in the original documents – fixed rate or adjustable rate – regardless of the economic conditions at the time of the lawsuit.

Applying Original Intent to the Constitution, ask yourself this: what do you think the Founding Fathers would have thought of homosexual marriage? Of women wanting to abort their unborn children? Would the Founders have considered these as fundamental rights like the right to choose your own religion, the right to speak up about politics, the right to a trial by jury? I don’t think so.

And what would the Founders have thought about the right of ordinary citizens to carry firearms to protect themselves at home, on the roads, and against a tyrannical government? Remember, the Founders weren’t always the graceful statutes and paintings you see in museums, they were the people who planned and carried out a revolution to overthrow their own government. I suspect they thought the people’s right to own military-grade weapons was essential to protecting the rest of the people’s rights from encroachment by the government.

That’s what’s at stake in this confirmation. Kavanaugh will be the fifth Original Intent seat on the Court. He’ll give the traditional, conservative method a majority. Roe v. Wade is at risk of being overturned, as it should be, being entirely made up law with no historical support at all. And Obergefell v. Hodges is such a perversion that Justice Kennedy should hide his head in a bag.

That’s why Democrats are being savage. They see their path to subverting the nation blocked. They can’t win at the polls if they declare their goals honestly, they can’t win in the courts with Kavanaugh on the bench, the next step in fomenting revolution is violence. Assassination is not out of the question. Whoever provides security for Republicans in Washington should double their details.

That last bit seems like it’s more and more likely ever week.

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