Posted on 10/06/2020 6:58:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
History! Don't we know by this stage in the Damn-demic Era that history is what you make up to push a point you want everybody else to take up? The New York Times' rancid "1619 Project" comes sorrowfully to mind.
So, if we hate the prospect of ramming through, as part of the Democratic agenda, a proposal to pack the Supreme Court with Democratic yes-persons -- well, "C'mon, man," as Joe Biden would so elegantly put it -- don't look back to the last time the Democrats threw this obscene gesture our way. And fell on their populist posteriors. Or however Franklin Roosevelt would have described his fellow party members' sitting apparatus.
Coming off the most one-sided electoral triumph in U.S. history -- Republican opponent Alf Landon ran away with Maine and Vermont -- FDR picked a fight with the high court's troublesome New Deal-skeptical majority. Let's pass a law, said the president, authorizing me to name up to six justices whenever a member of the court's geezer-gaffer bloc (70-plus years of age) declined to move on to graceful retirement.
It was February 1937. Roosevelt doubtless felt invulnerable. Clear the tracks for the New Deal! All aboard for more government action! Save that the idea went down poorly even with various liberals, e.g., Montana's Burton K. Wheeler, who said in a radio address: "Create now a political Court to echo the ideas of the executive and you have created a weapon; a weapon which in the hands of another President could ... cut down those guarantees of liberty written by the blood of your forefathers."
Meaning sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Eh, Joe? Asked by Chris Wallace his view of court-packing proposals meant to protect Roe v. Wade and other progressive precedents, Biden hid the ball nimbly so as, presumably, to keep his options open. He hardly reinforced the theory active among his party's nonprogressives that the candidate is -- pass it along -- a moderate.
Court packing, as it was dubbed during debate over the Roosevelt nostrum, is anything but a moderate approach to the healing of major political differences through patience and argumentation. It is a summons to stick it to the otherwise-minded, to turn a supposedly independent branch of the federal government into just another instrument of the power elite -- a kangaroo court for the prompt disposal of rational objections to the-way-it's-gonna-be-now-brother.
Roe v. Wade is froth on the deep brew of the matter. The framers of the Constitution had in mind an exquisite balancing act -- this power arrayed so as to frustrate, if needed, the exercise of another power, legitimate but overwrought in some present application. We would all come out somewhere around midfield in the great debates certain to arise -- no faction, no constituency possessing the power to overwhelm, to have things one way and not another.
The high court, as matters evolved in the early republic, positioned itself as an arbiter of major disputes. Fighting over Supreme Court decisions (e.g., Dred Scott v. Sandford, Brown v. Board of Education) became a means of intellectual clarification. You would not say, "Wait, just a minute here" to the author of "Mein Kampf." You could and would say it to the court. And get by with it.
Progressivism (to use a term that better signifies radicalism than actual progress) has in mind preventing others from getting by with ideas that would seem to merit, at the very least, a hearing, with time at the end for rebuttal.
It is the college debater in me, the forensic thruster and parryer, that inspires me the most, after all these years, to relish assertion and rebuttal and never, ever the shutdown of a telling, possibly unforeseen way of looking at things and getting society over a hump.
Too many progressives shrink from the challenge and opportunity of rebuttal. They know I'm wrong -- as I may be, upon the freedom to be wrong and, nonetheless, go right on talking. Thereupon rest all our freedoms. Which is why intellectual shutdown -- as enforced on the U.S. Supreme Court or any other institution that traffics in ideas -- can be called an idea only in a single, malodorous sense. Out the window it must go.
Rather than increasing the court, we would probably see a a bill that sets aside the courts decision (appeals or SCOTUS) that is passed and signed by the POTUS.
More liberal head explosions.
I understand that your response is likely hyperbole. However, any mention of court packing regardless of party should be taken as a serious affront to liberty. Our founders seemed to have a pretty good grasp of how to best create a government. The idea of packing a court in order to promote an agenda is anathema to everything they worked for.
I just like to think, Trump loves to spin up the left into a frenzy, and the Dims would drop the subject into a deep hole if they can't take advantage of it.
Even Democrats opposed FDR’s court packing plan.
Those of us who believe in the historical founding would find it rings hollow, even if said in jest.
As popular as FDR allegedly was, I keep thinking that instead of packing the Court with state sovereignty-ignoring activist Democratic justices who saw things his way to get the constitutionally indefensible “New Deal” programs that he wanted, why didn’t he instead establish his “New Deal” programs within the framework of the Constitution?
More specifically, FDR should have first lead Congress to successfully propose appropriate amendments to the Constitution to the states which would have given Congress the new express powers that it needed to establish FDR’s otherwise constitutionally indefensible programs.
In fact, the country could have referred to the new amendments as the FDR New Deal amendments to honor him.
But the reality is that FDR’s Court-packing approach to establishing his New Deal programs strongly suggests that neither FDR, or the post-17th Amendment ratification, Democratic-controlled Congress at the time, understood the necessity of amending the Constitution for new federal government powers to establish his programs.
To put the country back on its constitutional foundations, patriots now need to entice PDJT to lead the states to ratify an amendment to repeal the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments by naming it the “Trump Freedom (From Unconstitutionally Big Federal Government) Amendment.”
Send “Orange Man Bad” federal and state government desperate Democrats home in November!
Supporting PDJT with a new patriot Congress and state government leaders that will promise to fully support his already excellent work for MAGA and stopping SARS-CoV-2 will effectively give fast-working Trump a “third term” in office imo.
I don’t see any problem with voting Republican ticket for 2020 elections.
Insights welcome.
come November, President Trump has packed the court.
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