Do You Want Five Ivy League Lawyers to Rule You, or the Democratic Process?
Even though Mike DeWine, Jon Husted & the Ohio General Assembly are beyond ineffective when it comes to getting things done, I’ll take those political slackers over five Ivy League lawyers.
You might be scratching your head wondering why I would ask that question. You might think it is an obvious question. Let me assure you it is THE most important question facing Americans today. Over the last eighty years, a philosophy arose in America in which the U.S. Supreme Court went from being “the least dangerous branch,’ as our Founding Fathers considered it, to the most powerful branch. Realizing it could never get its agenda through the democratic process, the Left launched its mission to control the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt’s court packing threat embodied in the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. Roosevelt’s threat worked, as the Supreme Court suddenly began finding constitutional the same type of federal laws it had been finding unconstitutional. For much of the last eighty years beginning with National Relations Labor Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, the Left has controlled the Supreme Court. That control resulted in the massive—and I mean massive—expansion of the federal government and its powers coming from the significant loss of power and sovereignty of the fifty states.
Though you can check yourself, despite having Republican presidents for thirty-six years who appointed many Supreme Court justices, many of those justices drifted ever-leftward during their time on the Supreme Court (not one appointed by either Democrat or Republican presidents EVER drifted right), thereby rubber-stamping the Left’s radical progressive agenda. Sandra Day O’Conner and David Souter are the best examples of this process. It turned out being invited to Georgetown salon gatherings with Washington’s elite and being feted at the Kennedy Center proved more intoxicating than adhering to conservative judicial philosophies. The tide seemed to start turning with the appointments of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win allowed him to appoint three new justices (with a special assist from Mitch McConnell to thankfully keep political hack Merrick Garland off the court) who solidified a 5-3-1 conservative majority that would begin paring back federal powers and strengthening the power of the People and the states. The one is John Roberts who seems more interested in minimizing criticism of the court via institutionalism versus sticking to the originalist judicial philosophy that got him put on the court.
To understand the problem with rule by the Supreme Court, you just need to think about the system of checks and balances established in our Constitution. Fundamentally, there are only two ways to reverse a decision by the Supreme Court. First, the Supreme Court can reverse itself, which is a decades-long battle as evidenced by the Roe v. Wade decision and eventual reversal. The second way to reverse the Supreme Court is to pass a constitutional amendment, which requires supermajorities in both chambers of Congress and approval by thirty-eight states. Passing a constitutional amendment is the HARDEST thing to do in our Republic, which is why only seventeen amendments since passage of the Bill of Rights have been approved. Thus, unlike a law passed by Congress and signed by the President or an Executive Order, a Supreme Court decision is THE law of the land until it decides it isn’t.
To point a finer point on this issue, only five of the justices need to agree on the decision to make it the law of the land. Because virtually all Supreme Court justices now come from either Harvard or Yale, the question really is: do you want five Ivy League lawyers to rule you, or the democratic process? By democratic process, I refer to bicameralism and presentment either federally or in the fifty states (except in Nebraska’s unicameral system). Our Founding Fathers were very fearful of being ruled by a tyranny of the minority. I can think of nothing democratically scarier, frankly, than five Ivy League lawyers ruling me, my family, friends, neighbors, and their businesses. That is tyranny of an extremely infinitesimal minority in a country of 330 million citizens. I’d much prefer to fight political battles in Congress and state legislatures to determine how I will be governed. You?
This question matters today because the Left once again is threatening to pack the Supreme Court once they get control of Congress and the White House. Their agenda is dead in the water without packing the Supreme Court, thereby allowing five Ivy League lawyers to find “penumbras and emanations” to ratify every progressive item on their wish list. If they succeed, the America we grew up in will be gone and state sovereignty will be nonexistent. I’ve previously written about how government has gotten “too smart” with so many of the people who lead it utterly disconnected from Main Street America after they’ve spent their lives since turning eighteen ensconced in elite institutions. That problem is especially acute on the Supreme Court where virtually every justice and clerk working for them are egghead lawyers from Ivy League schools who can tell you how many angels can theoretically fit on the tip of a needle, but couldn’t tell you how much a gallon of milk costs.
As perspective, remember, the Supreme Court has found all of these acts constitutional:
Denying the citizenship of black Americans thereby legalizing slavery (Dred Scott);
Approving separate but equal classrooms and other accommodation for white and minorities (Plessy);
Prohibiting growing your own food for home consumption (Wickard);
Rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in concentration camps (Korematsu); and
Forcing women to be sterilized because they weren’t deemed eugenically fit (Buck).
Those pushing for five Ivy League lawyers to rule over us never contemplate that the Supreme Court would ever issue decisions they find offensive, but history strongly suggests otherwise. Though my friends on the Right hate when I point his out, some of them join the Left when they push to have the Supreme Court issue decisions that set national policy untethered by the actual words in the Constitution. It is equally improper for the Supreme Court to ban abortion as it was for the Supreme Court to permit abortion by federalizing an area clearly left to the states under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. What would the Left do had the Supreme Court reversed Roe replacing it with a national abortion ban? Thankfully, it didn’t, as the conservative justices adhere to the belief that their decisions must be rooted in the actual words in the Constitution (versus how they might like the law to be).
The World According to Matt would, in my opinion, be a much better place to live, but that isn’t the system of government our Founding Fathers established with their blood, sweat, tears, fortunes, and lives. The World According to Five Ivy League Lawyers isn’t much different than being ruled by just me. We should all—the Left and the Right—far prefer to be ruled by the people we elect to state legislatures, governor's offices, Congress, and the presidency, as we can throw them out if they go too far or not far enough and far more easily reverse whatever cockamamie laws they force through without the true support of the majority. Plus, when Congress and the President stick to the actual powers granted them in the Constitution with the remainder of powers left with the states, we get the added bonus of being able to vote with our feet by moving among the fifty laboratories of competition when the state where we live goes too far afield (e.g., California and New York).
So, ask I you: where do you want the power over your life to reside—Washington or in your state capital? Even though Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, and the supermajority Republican Ohio General Assembly are beyond ineffective when it comes to getting good things done, I’ll take those political slackers over five Ivy League lawyers.
P.S. For those of you who read my December 2022 review of New York Post reporter Miranda Devine’s first book, "Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide,” you know I’m an enormous fan of Devine. Her weekly columns are among must-reads each week. She and her colleague, Emma-Jo Morris, both deserved Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on Hunter laptop, but such prizes only go to left-wing media hacks who target Donald Trump. Devine has just published her second book, “The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America,” that makes a very strong case against Joe and Hunter Biden, with lots of details I have never heard before. I strongly urge you to read Devine’s book if you want to see just how the Biden’s fleeced foreign countries and sold out America to become multimillionaires. They both deserve to go to jail. "The Big Guy" is well worth your time, I promise.