With the words “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and “I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me,” Judge Neil Gorsuch was sworn in as the 113th Justice of the Supreme Court, which won’t end the political posturing and hyperbole from the left.
You can expect a generation or two of complaining from the sore losers whose limping marches of protest are caused by being shot in their collective foot by Harry Reid just so that Democrats could pack the lower federal courts with hard-left ideologue judges.
Republicans had no choice but to exercise the Reid Gambit, named for Harry Reid who authored and should be forever tarred and feathered with that cynical subversion of Senate rules that Republicans were unwillingly forced to re-deploy to protect the Constitution against further leftist court-packing schemes.
Arch progressive and leftist Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, whose antipathy towards Gorsuch borders on psychotic obsession said “A nominee’s decisions will affect the lives of all Americans for generations.” Yes, they will, and thankfully so. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, another obsessed and enraged leftist wrote “Why did the Democrats filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch? Because they’ve had enough with the politics of power grabbing and bullying.”
What neither Feinstein nor Dionne will admit is that the vast majority of Supreme Court-related bullying and power grabbing has historically come from leftists, including democrats, progressives and socialists.
Conservatives by definition argue for respecting traditions that have been refined, tested and proven in the forge of history unless change is truly necessary, and that when change is necessary it still must come carefully and with sober deliberation and great caution. Therefore conservatives hold to the historical premise of the Founders that the Constitution is to be a steadfast, reliable, stable framework from which the nation draws unity, strength and security precisely because changing it take tremendous concerted national effort resulting in change that truly reflects the will of the people and embodies their consent to be so governed.
But democrats, progressives and socialists don’t like conservative constitutional inertia because it opposes their radical desire to achieve their political goals swiftly according to their agenda regardless of what the people actually want. Leveraging the whims and caprices of popular public opinion in order to achieve radical political change is their orthodoxy.
The political left is an elitist ideology that believes that citizens are simply too stupid and too ignorant to rule themselves and that only they, the socialist intellectual elite hold proper advanced social justice attitudes and therefore only they are fit to rule you, the lumpen proletarian. That elitist attitude is what lost Hillary the election with her disdain for middle America and is equally clearly reflected in Obama’s “they cling to guns or religion” insult.
Leftists see the Constitution as an impediment to shifting the foundations of our Republic towards easy manipulation. They view it as a “living document” that they can change at will to achieve their political goals, and they will brook no delay. The leftist progressive administrative state birthed by Woodrow Wilson and bulked up on steroids by Barack Obama proved this with the tens of thousands of intrusive and often illegal administrative regulations put in place during his eight-year attempt to subvert the Republic.
The Constitution is not written in stone and it can be changed, but doing so requires a deliberately and intentionally long process of difficult, sober national reflection and the advice and consent of we, the People. The process is called “constitutional amendment,” and it is the only manner in which the Constitution can be revised.
And that stability is what Justices of the Supreme Court and indeed all judges are compelled by their oaths of office to preserve, protect and defend, no matter what their personal opinions about social justice or politics might be. They must leave lawmaking to the lawmakers. There is today no more capable and honorable person available to the republic for the protection of constitutional integrity and stability than Justice Neil Gorsuch.