Whatsoever Ye Sow . . .
The rest of that archaic biblical exhortation is “so shall ye reap”. The Democrats, and their mighty chorus of media acolytes, are outraged that Mr. Trump won’t deliver a humble resignation statement and fade away. They are doubly outraged that he and Mitch jammed through a Supreme Court confirmation with weeks remaining before the election. Instead of fulminating, they might want to look in the mirror for part of the explanation. Both actions can properly be characterized as perfectly logical escalations in the political war we are currently waging.
I won’t go through the whole bloody history of the politicization of our judiciary, just some of the last few chapters. In 2010, Republicans took the House in a red wave election. Obama could not get any of the legislation he wanted through the House. He decided to try to govern via Executive Orders. The DC Circuit court found a number of those Orders unconstitutional. Harry Reid, then Senate Majority Leader, decided that he needed to fill vacancies on that court with judges who would look more favorably upon the President’s actions. In order to do that, he ended the filibuster for judicial appointments (except the Supreme Court). When the Republicans became the Senate majority, they retaliated by refusing to consider Obama’s last nominee for the Court and later ended the filibuster for that Court’s appointments. Both of those moves were the utterly predictable harvest of Reid/Obama’s seeding.
Moments after the 2016 election, demonstrators were in the street, egged on by Democratic politicians and their media allies, shouting “not my President” and the social media campaign (#RESIST) got underway. Some honeymoon! The drumbeat has gone on daily ever since. Every day and in every way, efforts to throw Trump out of the White House have been ongoing. And we expect this guy to bow out gracefully? If you start a war, you don’t get to end it because you say so. The enemy gets a vote.
The left wing of the Democratic party is calling for adding two states in order to get four new Democratic Senators, ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, etc. The underlying assumption is that the other team will never regain power; that harvest day will never come. Anyone conducting a war needs to remember that every escalation holds out the promise of an escalation from the other side. Be careful what you sow.
Democracy succeeds by means of laws and norms, some unwritten. If the laws are ignored and the norms trampled, the institution is in danger. We are in danger of turning the American Revolution into the French Revolution, to be followed by the guillotine and a dictator.
