Kavanaugh might be the left's nightmare, but he will restore the Supreme Court to its proper role

close

Video

Kavanaugh hearing day 4: Confirmation highlights

A multitude of witnesses testify on the final day of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, including John Dean, Theodore Olson, Akhil Amar, Cedric Richmond, Elizabeth Weintraub, Aalayah Eastmond, and Rochelle Garza.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court finally wrapped up Friday, paving the way for his virtually certain confirmation by the full Senate later this month – despite frenzied attempts by Trump-hating Democrats to stop the president from seating a second justice on the high court.

The committee is expected to vote Sept. 20 to confirm the highly qualified judge, who is now on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The full Senate is expected to confirm Kavanaugh the following week, so he can be seated on the high court when it begins its new term Oct. 1.

Many people have compared the judge’s confirmation hearing, which began Tuesday, to a circus. The hearing was disrupted repeatedly by Democratic senators and screaming protesters.

The protesters were removed by Capitol Police every few minutes. The Democratic senators who interrupted, lectured and hectored Kavanaugh stayed in the hearing room and kept up their attacks for as long as they could.

At one point it felt like it would have been perfectly normal for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to come rolling down the main aisle of the hearing room in a clown car, honking wildly before hopping out and dousing Kavanaugh with water from a squirt gun.

The Democrats made lame attempts to trip up Kavanaugh on a number of issues, but the judge patiently and calmly listened to insults and absurd questions and held his own.

Two of the worst offenders were Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Both were insulting and rude to Kavanaugh, as they clearly auditioned for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by showing how opposed they were to President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

We’ve now discovered that the most dangerous place to be in Washington is between Harris and a TV camera. And we’ve learned that Booker has delusions that he’s a modern-day Spartacus – a brave gladiator rebelling against tyranny and injustice – although the stunt he staged blew up in his face.

There was a reason for all of this spectacle. The left has finally awakened to what its members see as a horrifying reality: they are losing control for perhaps a generation or more of the Supreme Court, their favorite vehicle for expanding the administrative state.

For decades, members of the left has viewed the Supreme Court as their super-legislative body, legislating by fiat from the bench, with the justices being veritable lawmakers in black robes instead of the interpreters of the law they are meant to be.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., gave the Democratic senators an excellent civics lesson on all this – one of the positive highlights of the hearing.

Those on the left have always been frustrated by the separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government in our Constitution, as they seek to build a powerful administrative state. They’ve attempted to undermine it, gut it, destroy its essence and manipulate the legislative process via the judicial branch.

By turning the Supreme Court into a super legislative body, the left has thrown off the balance of power among the federal branches. By using the courts to consolidate power in Washington, the left has turned the idea of federalism from a fact into a farce.

If he will rule on the Supreme Court as he has in his previous court decisions, Kavanaugh is expected to restore constitutional order and the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government. He is also expected to restore the balance of power between the federal government and state governments.

The Supreme Court can play an important role in restraining and dismantling the leviathan of the administrative state. Today we are not truly living under the Founding Fathers’ vision of our constitutional republic. We’ve been operating more under the progressives’ vision of statism, in which power is consolidated under a massive government that forces and compels progress toward what the left considers to be utopia here on Earth.

So the confirmation of Kavanaugh would of course be a significant step in the right direction for those of us who believe constitutional order needs to be restored. The next step will be when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat is vacated and a judge like Amy Barrett is appointed to replace her.

In addition to generating an even more unhinged spectacle of hysteria during the confirmation process, another originalist judge on the bench would allow some of the Supreme Court’s most egregious decisions – like Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide – to finally be dealt with.

Hopefully, by the time the Trump presidency ends the Supreme Court will be is stacked with seven originalists who will put the Supreme Court out of reach of the left for a generation, significantly diminishing the administrative state.

As the old saying goes: “Elections have consequences.” One of the consequences of electing Donald Trump as president was to enable him to appoint originalist judges so that we might actually get America back to some semblance of a constitutional republic, with real separation of powers.