Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) warned today of great damage to the Court should it reverse Obamacare.
“Nice court you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it” was the USA Today tagline, right out of the mouth of the Frank Nitti, Capone capo.
No mere prediction, this was a threat, in keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, for criminal thuggery abounds these days.
As I’ve spent most of the day trying to explain, the Court answers to no constituency in the political sense, so really isn’t concerned about how any faction of the public feels about it…nor should it…unless Blumenthal has in mind sending some of the boys over with a horse’s head for Kennedy’s or Robert’s office. So, I doubt there’s much to the threat part of this threat. It’s more like a prediction of things to come, that a great deal of people (of the Left) will no longer respect the court as it once did.
Big whoop, you’re thinking. After not respecting the Warren Court for almost thirty years, I’d enjoy seeing some of those respectful citizens line up to disrespect one I kind of like.
But the exact same can be said about the conservative members of the Court, should one of them flip sides, as to how their “conservative base” (in their world there isn’t one) feels about them.
The court’s members really don’t feel the partisan heat of having let “their side” down.
But they do feel heat.
For the Court can do great harm to itself, and they know it. For by trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle in this case, it may find it has rendered the Court, as we have seen in third world states where the high court was the last barrier between the people and tyranny standing, little more than a ceremonial factotum, merely rubber-stamping an all-powerful Congress…a Congress every member knows to have acted extra-constitutionally and unconstitutionally just in getting this law passed. They read the papers, they know that the facts underlying the economic, medical and social theory of Obamacare were, on the most part, lies. And they know many of those lies have already revealed themselves. They know the people are overwhelmingly against this law.
To be sure, at least four of the Court’s members approve of this leftist power grab. But not necessarily as to style or extent. Still, they all have to know that if this sort of capricious congressional and executive behavior is riveted into place by the Court, it will have diminished its own ability and power to undo or limit the almost-guaranteed excesses that will ensue. Once the Court becomes inconsequential, it is inconsequential, to right and left alike. When, at some point a few years from now, having been pushed too far, a new Court tries to put its foot down and regain its former power vis a vis the executive or Congress, some new president may well say, as did Napoleon and Stalin about the Papacy…
“Where are the Court’s (pope’s) armies?”, then go on about his business.
Besides, despite all the speculation about a member of the right flipping, if there is any chance of one member coming over to the other in this case, I have to rely on the one thing on which seven members of the Court most assuredly agree:
Elena Kagan is the most glittering jewel of stupidity and craven cupidity to have ever worn a robe in that building, and no one there will feel easy about being found on the same side of any issue she is on.
If I were on the Left, I’d be losing a lot of sleep the next two months because of the open and notorious non-Kagan sentiment on the Court. Some things trump even political solidarity.
