Tyranny of the minority: Liberal law profs urge Biden to defy the courts and the public
“I shall resist any illegal federal court order.”
When “the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong,” the president should refuse to follow it.
Those two statements were made roughly 60 years apart. The first is from segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D). The second was made by two liberal professors this month.
In one of the most chilling developments in our history, the left has come to embrace the authoritarian language and logic of segregationists in calling for defiance and radical measures against the Supreme Court.
In a recent open letter, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.” Thus, in light of the court’s bar on the use of race in college admissions, they argue that Biden should just continue to follow his own constitutional interpretation.
We live in interesting times.
Prepare appropriately.
They call it “gravely mistaken constitutional interpretations,” and the decider of what meets that bar is…wait for it…them.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad: Only a few days ago we were discussing this article https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html about Trump’s desire to massively increase the power of the executive, and here we have a couple libs asking Biden to do the same.
Has everyone just completely lost their mind?
On second thought, don’t answer that.
Unfortunately, there is a huge chunk of both major parties’ base that wants a dictatorship by their side. They no longer care to convince others or to seek true compromise. They want to force others to do as they say. They seek to force everyone everywhere live the way they say to live and and believe the way they say to believe.
There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. — Daniel Webster
The older I get, the more wisdom I see in the idea that anyone who wants power should be kept as far from it as possible. That desiring political office and authority over others should be an automatic disqualifier.
Where that leaves elections — in which people voluntarily announce their candidacy and enter races (i.e. they have to want it at some level) — I’m not sure. But the more crap I see from both parties, the more IDGAF about that part.
I’m sure at some point I’ll be willing to run for office and hold it as long as possible — not because I want power, but just to keep career politicians from it.
I’ve had the idea for a while of destroying the ideal of “career politician” by making elected legislative positions have a cost: You do your term in whatever legislative body you want, and then you’re out for an equal amount of time. By “out”, I mean you’re out of the government business: you can’t hold any position of any kind funded by taxes, relying on government authority, or given any deference not also given to any other private citizen. It also means you can’t interact with government on the behalf of other people, so you can’t practice law or be a lobbyist or be a “community organizer”. You can run for office, but you can’t take office until the first day the restriction is up.
But if you do that, the real power goes to the aids and chiefs of staff and the like that hang around the various capitols, telling the elected officials what to do, writing their speeches, etc, right? So, the above needs to be combined with another idea: Ten years of working in a safe government job is more than enough for any citizen. 10 years times 52 weeks times 5 working days is 2600 safe government working days, and that’s quite enough. Want to work longer than that? Do some dangerous or strenuous duty at public expense, like patrol cop or in the field with Border patrol or anything but being in the air conditioning at a desk. Working as staff in an elected official’s office is a good way to burn down your limited personal safe public duty days.
Awful lof of people seem to really want WROL. Wonder if they know what comes next.
An awful lot of those people think that the rest of us restrain ourselves solely because of the law, and want to ditch the law as an excuse to get froggy.
They don’t realize that even in a “without rule of law” situation, we’ll still be peaceable and we’ll still just want to be left alone. They also don’t realize that the law is there only partially to protect us from them; it also protects them from us.
Something that frequently pops up on my media feeds:
A [martial arts] student asked his master, “You teach me violence, yet you speak of peace. How do you reconcile the two?” The master responded, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.”
When I see the low-information types advocating getting rid of the Rule of Law, a voice in the back of my mind goes, “Just try it, waterboy.”
All good comments!
And wouldn’t we be advocating the same action if the SCOTUS decided against the 2A in Bruen? Then told the commies they can ban and confiscate any gun they want?
We would already be in a shooting war.
The words of the constitution are the ideas we use to live by as a whole.
And agree to. But in the end, they’re just words.
The known quantity is that the closer we are to communist ideas, the closer we are to mass murder.
And presidential dictates are final stage communism. Especially when made by diaper wearing senile power puppet, placed in office by a blatantly stolen election. Surrounded by a crew that were handpicked for ability to tell the most ignorant of lies with a straight face.
Tell Joke Biden to do his worst. Because, if I were emperor for a day…..
The difference is that Wallace was correct.
Just more proof that the criminal communist left does not actually believe in “law and order”…and the law is merely a tool to be used against their enemies and otherwise ignored.
Current situation is Israel is a real life simulation. Except the Israeli Supreme Court is a self-perpetuating body what still has the leftist bias of decades of Socialist rule from 1948 until the Likud victories in the the 1970s and intermittently since then. The current government is attempting to bring some notion of accountability to them engendering massive resistance. (There may also be a Color Revolution going on.)