This is not just a fight for one Supreme Court nominee. It is a fight for the rule of law, the restoration of Constitutional government, and the right of women to live freely without being stereotyped by the political and cultural Left.
President Trump reportedly will select Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
In a better and more politically mature country, this would be significant news, of course, but hardly the occasion for a titanic political fight, with far-reaching ramifications that promise to resonate deeply throughout the wider culture.
Yet, both the Left and the Right, conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, view this nomination as critically important and a landmark event in American history.
Judicial Overreach. That is because the courts and the judiciary increasingly have played an outsized role in American politics. Public-policy decisions that, by all rights under the Constitution, should be decided by the American people through their elected representatives have been decided instead by unelected judges.
The Left generally has welcomed and promoted judicial overreach because it has allowed them to short-circuit the legislative process and to achieve their political and public-policy objectives through judicial decree.
For this same reason, of course, the Right generally has lamented and opposed judicial overreach because it has denied them even the possibility of achieving their political and public-policy objectives legislatively and at the ballot box.
Hence the present moment, where nominations to the Supreme Court have become politically momentous events that promise to radically alter our public-policy universe. But this is not what the American Founding Fathers intended when they created an independent judiciary.
The Founding Fathers viewed the judiciary as performing an important but limited role: interpreting and applying the law in a narrowly prescribed technical sense, not creating new rights that correspond with our evolving sense of justice.
If the courts had remained faithful to this original purpose, then we would be spared all of the Sturm und Drang that now surrounds Supreme Court nominations.
Instead of being political spectacles, where underhanded partisans try to destroy the nominee, we would have more low-key affairs in which the Senate performs its advise and consent role with little notice and little fanfare.
Left-Wing Attacks. Of course, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the vicious and savage attacks on Supreme Court nominees have come exclusively from one side: the political left.
The low-blows started with the smearing of Robert Bork in 1987 and they culminated in the attempted character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh two years ago. Democratic nominees, by contrast, have been treated fairly and respectfully by conservatives.
But as a married woman with seven children—including a special needs child and two adopted children from Haiti—Barrett is much more difficult target to smear and defame.
And that is why her nomination is so critically important: because it promises to restore, finally and belatedly, the Constitutional balance of power between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; and because it promises a fair and honest fight—a fight which will help illuminate for the American people what is at stake and the proper role of the judiciary in our system of government.
Conservative Disappointment. I say finally and belatedly because conservatives have been trying for decades to rein in the courts through judicial appointments, but with limited success and much disappointment.
Robert Bork, for instance, never made it to the Supreme Court after being smeared by the Left and narrowly voted down by the Senate. His replacement, Anthony Kennedy, was no originalist.
Kennedy, in fact, voted to uphold an utterly manufactured Constitutional right to abortion, while spearheading a series of decisions that culminated in an equally fabricated Constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
To avert a contentious Senate confirmation fight, George H. W. Bush gave us David Souter, who turned out to be reliably liberal or left-wing justice. And George W. Bush gave us Chief Justice John Roberts, who has inexplicably sided with the Left in several key decisions involving, for instance, Obamacare and the U.S. Census.
Even Neil Gorsuch, a Trump nominee, has surprised and disappointed conservatives by finding new “progressive” meaning in statutes long considered fixed and settled.
For this reason—because conservative justices can occasionally stray and be heterodox and unpredictable in their thinking—it is probably necessary to have six originalists on the Court before Constitutional order can be restored.
A Justice Barrett would be, essentially, the Court’s sixth originalist.
Cultural Significance. Barrett’s ascension to the high court also will have far-reaching political and cultural significance. She is a practicing Catholic who takes her faith seriously and, as mentioned, is the mother of seven children, including a special needs child and two adopted children from Haiti.
As such, she represents a type of woman in America—conservative and religious, educated and accomplished, professional and family-oriented—that progressive cultural denizens in Hollywood and the media ignore, ridicule, and caricature.
Yet there are millions of such women in America today and their voices deserve to be heard and recognized.
A Justice Barrett, simply by being who she is, will help ensure that these women—our wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—no longer are ignored, ridiculed, and caricatured.
In short, this is the fight we want and the justice we need. Barrett’s nomination is the culmination of a decades-long effort to restore Constitutional government in America. The country will be notably freer and immeasurably better off when that is achieved.
Feature photo credit: The Federalist.