Sapping The Foundations

The latest episode of political pearl-clutching centers around one of the Left's favorite people: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

"Favorite" as in a man they absolutely love to hate. A man who, until the Untethered Orange Id pre-empted Herself's coronation in 2016, probably drew more odious left-rage than any other public figure in recent history.

Why the especial enmity for someone whose story of success should be greatly admired? One simple reason: he's a black man who left their plantation and became a Supreme Court justice.

He's in the news again, not for authoring a landmark Court decision or for offering insights about race that make the Left squirm, but rather for hanging out with a rich friend and not telling everyone about it (spoiler alert, he didn't have to, and he did his due diligence).

As aptly phrased at the Wall Street Journal, "that’s it." Despite the giant nothing-burger nature of this latest outrage, the inestimable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is blathering about drawing up articles of impeachment. That such would go absolutely nowhere is beside the point, of course.

The point is that the Left, utterly enraged that Le Grand Orange tipped the ideological balance of the Court and even more outraged over a handful of Court rulings that impede its bottomless thirst for power, control, and the jackboot-stomping of political foes, is willing to burn the entire system down because it didn't get its way.

The Court has been under attack for years now, with the peak-freakout stemming from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade and returned the abortion matter to state legislatures. No matter that blue states are now free to expand abortion access beyond Roe's viability test, the notion that red states might do the opposite infuriates them. It must be mentioned here that the Bruen decision that knocked down a few states’ excessive restrictions on gun rights also cranked them up to eleven.

What's a proper Leftist to do when one of the three co-equal branches of government isn't bending the knee? Assassinate its reputation, undermine its legitimacy, and try to intimidate (I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. - Senator Charles E. "Chuck" Schumer (D, NY)) the Justices in an attempt to tip future rulings leftward. In addition, as the Journal posits, create pressures to prompt conservative Justices to recuse themselves from hot-issue cases, establish new rules that make picayune transgressions impeachable offenses, and lay the groundwork for court packing in the future.

Beyond all that (as if that's not enough), I figure they hope to taint all that this Court does, so that future Courts might be more inclined to overturn decisions the Left doesn't like. The Dobbs overturning of Roe, Citizens United's affirmation of speech rights, the Heller-McDonald-Bruen gun rights trio, the Carson and Bremerton religious freedom cases, and others would all, if our Left had its way, be nixed. The Speech and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, and some other bits and pieces would be stripped out of the Constitution under some farcically ironic assertion of "rights."

Rights, you see, only accrue to the people who deserve them, and the only people who deserve them think a certain way, support the correct causes and candidates, believe in the government when it's run by their side, and have no use for the government when it's run by anyone else. With "equity" replacing "equality," this disparate treatment becomes not only tenable, but preferred.

Imagine if Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was subject to a fraction of the bile that Clarence Thomas receives on a daily basis. The screams of "racism" would echo across every tract of blue in America. But, because Thomas is a race-traitor in their eyes, it's all OK - deserved even.

This stuff just further erodes the foundations of the country. Respect for the rule of law is being replaced by subjective and selective enforcement. Violence is not only excused if it's by the correct people or for the correct reasons, it's actually encouraged by far too many of the Best-and-Brightest, including those we elect to govern the nation and uphold the Constitution. The "heckler's veto" is now an accepted and encouraged part of the political landscape.

Those who support all this erosion - excluding the subset who actually want the country to collapse - think that it alls serves a near future time when they are in charge of everything, where the Right has been cowed into submission, and where everyone who doesn't agree with them has given up the fight and accepted their new reality. What they don't see (the too-common blindness born of hubris) is that all this tells the Right 'go ahead, do the same when you're in power.' Already we are hearing whispers of the GOP House majority giving the Trump treatment to prominent political figures on the Left.

This is banana republic shit. You don't build a stable, prosperous, and free nation by turning its machinery against your counterparts when you win.

Unfortunately, “stable, prosperous, and free” is not the end goal. Like all good fascists, our Best-and-Brightest seek a state of dominance, control, and intimidation, where they rule the roost and where they get to mistreat anyone they don’t like with impunity.