Time and time again, supposedly “educated” adults show their ignorance when it comes to the government of the United States of America.
Let me clarify a couple of items. First, the word ignorance is not the same as stupid. Someone who is ignorant is uneducated. Second, I’m not the most educated person in my family, and I’m definitely not the most intelligent person on the block. But I do know a little bit about our form of government.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein demonstrated his ignorance for the whole world in a June 29 column. I defend his right to do so.
Like most progressives, he cannot get over the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturned Roe v. Wade.
In his column, Klein lamented, “Making matters worse is that the Supreme Court has gone from being undemocratic to being anti-democratic.”
If he took the time to read the court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Kline would discover that SCOTUS turned the decision of abortion back to the elected representatives of each state. How is that anti-democratic?
Klein continued, “Lifetime appointments are iffy under the best of circumstances, but the vagaries of retirements and deaths have given Republicans a control that makes a mockery of the public will. Five of the court’s six Republican justices were appointed by presidents who initially took office after losing the popular vote.”
Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 with only 43 percent of the popular vote. I assume Klein has no problem with Clinton’s two supreme court appointments — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
Another ignorant writer at the Gray Lady, Jamelle Bouie, published an op-ed calling for court-packing and impeaching justices as a way to “discipline” the high court.
Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life so there is no pressure on them to please the public or any political party. Does she really believe that when the party in power disagrees with any court ruling, the offending judges should be impeached?
Maybe she thinks that judges who don’t “tow the party line” should be assassinated as they are in third-world countries.
Throughout my lifetime there have been many times when Republicans have been disappointed with Supreme Court Justices, some who were nominated by Republican presidents. Top of the list is Justice John Roberts, who has a record of siding with liberal justices on the Supreme Court.
The Washington Post did an analysis in 2019 of the number of court cases the Trump administration lost up to that point in Donald Trump’s presidency. It was more than 60.
I have been unable to find on the Internet any examples of Republicans calling for Supreme Court jurists to be impeached or calls to enlarge the Supreme Court to add more conservative jurists. That does not prove that it has not happened, but if it did it did not turn into a movement.
Another failure that many liberal writers fall into is thinking that the United States is a democracy. We are not. Children learn this in schools where the Pledge of Allegiance is still recited. It says, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.”
A legend says that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin in 1787 what kind of government did you create. His response was, “a Republic madam if you can keep it.”
Our founding fathers did not understand the institutions established by the constitution to be democratic but to be republican. They were against pure or unrestricted democracy. The reason was simple. A pure democracy could quickly turn into mob rule where a majority tramples the rights of the minority.
Legal scholar and Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University Robert George explains that “a Republic is a way of diffusing power. Of course it (our form of government) has strong democratic elements, but America was not created to be a pure democracy for very good reasons.”
Have you ever noticed that when Democrats lose in the courts or at the ballot box they lament it’s because democracy is failing? They continually attack the institutions they don’t agree with because they say it is not democratic. Klein is just one example.
