Pat Buchanan wrote this article.
“Disheartening and demoralizing,” wailed Judge Neil
Gorsuch of President Trump’s comments about the judges seeking to overturn his
90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from the Greater Middle East war zones.
What a wimp. Did our future justice break down
crying like Sen. Chuck Schumer? Sorry, this is not Antonin Scalia. And just
what horrible thing had our president said?
A “so-called judge” blocked the travel ban, said
Trump. And the arguments in court, where 9th Circuit appellate judges were
hearing the government’s appeal, were “disgraceful.” “A bad student in high
school would have understood the arguments better.”
Did the president disparage a couple of judges?
Yep.
Yet compare his remarks to the tweeted screeds of
Elizabeth Warren after her Senate colleague, Jeff Sessions, was confirmed as
attorney general.
Sessions, said Warren, represents “radical hatred.”
And if he makes “the tiniest attempt to bring his racism, sexism & bigotry”
into the Department of Justice, “all of us” will pile on.
Now this is hate speech. And it validates Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to use Senate rules to shut her down.
These episodes reveal much about America 2017.
They reflect, first, the poisoned character of our
politics. The language of Warren – that Sessions is steeped in “racism, sexism
& bigotry” – echoes the ugliest slander of the Hillary Clinton campaign,
where she used similar words to describe Trump’s “deplorables.”
Such language, reflecting as it does the beliefs of
one-half of America about the other, rules out any rapprochement in America’s
social or political life. This is pre-civil war language.
For how do you sit down and work alongside people
you believe to be crypto-Nazis, Klansmen and fascists? Apparently, you don’t.
Rather, you vilify them, riot against them, deny them the right to speak or to
be heard.
And such conduct is becoming common on campuses
today.
As for Trump’s disparagement of the judges, only
someone ignorant of history can view that as frightening.
Thomas Jefferson not only refused to enforce the
Alien & Sedition Acts of President John Adams, his party impeached Supreme
Court Justice Samuel Chase, who had presided over one of the trials.
Jackson defied Chief Justice John Marshall’s
prohibition against moving the Cherokees out of Georgia to west of the
Mississippi, where, according to the Harvard resume of Sen. Warren, one of them
bundled fruitfully with one of her ancestors, making her part Cherokee.
When Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that
President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus violated
the Constitution, Lincoln considered sending U.S. troops to arrest the chief
justice.
FDR proposed adding six justices to emasculate a
Supreme Court of the “nine old men” he reviled for having declared some New
Deal schemes unconstitutional.
President Eisenhower called his Supreme Court
choices Earl Warren and William Brennan two of the “worst mistakes” he made as
president. History bears Ike out. And here we come to the heart of the matter.
Whether the roll-out of the president’s temporary
travel ban was ill-prepared or not, and whether one agrees or not about which
nations or people should be subjected to extreme vetting, the president’s
authority in the matter of protecting the borders and keeping out those he sees
as potentially dangerous is universally conceded.
That a district judge would overrule the president
of the United States on a matter of border security in wartime is absurd.
When politicians don black robes and seize powers
they do not have, they should be called out for what they are – usurpers and
petty tyrants. And if there is a cause upon which the populist right should
unite, it is that elected representatives and executives make the laws and rule
the nation. Not judges, and not justices.
Indeed, one of the mightiest forces that has
birthed the new populism that imperils the establishment is that unelected
justices like Warren and Brennan, and their progeny on the bench, have remade
our country without the consent of the governed – and with never having been
smacked down by Congress or the president.
Consider. Secularist justices de-Christianized our
country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal
justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to
achieve racial balance in public schools. They turned over centuries of
tradition and hundreds of state, local and federal laws to discover that the
rights to an abortion and same-sex marriage were there in Madison’s
Constitution all along. We just couldn’t see them.
Trump has warned the judges that if they block his
travel ban, and this results in preventable acts of terror on American soil,
they will be held accountable. As rightly they should.
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House should use the
arrogant and incompetent conduct of these federal judges to make the case not
only for creating a new Supreme Court, but for Congress to start using Article
III, Section 2, of the Constitution – to restrict the jurisdiction of the
Supreme Court, and to reclaim its stolen powers.
A clipping of the court’s wings is long overdue.
No comments:
Post a Comment