OPINION:
For more than 30 years now, our federal courts have ground to a halt over the single dumbest debate ever thunk up by humans.
Does the Constitution mean what the Constitution says?
Legal mouth breathers, finger-sniffers and knuckle-draggers in the United States Senate come together to duke it out over this delusional debate every time a president nominates someone to the federal bench. This “debate” burns hottest whenever a president nominates someone to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment a Democrat first came up with the insane idea of arguing that the Constitution doesn’t actually mean what it actually says. But we know it was sometime around when Democrats on the Supreme Court discovered abortion rights in the “penumbras” of the Constitution — meaning abortion rights are not in the Constitution, but Democrats found them anyway.
After all, if you are going to argue that something is in the Constitution when it clearly is not — or something is not in the Constitution when it clearly is — then you have to be creative.
These enthusiastic tramplers of liberty defile the Constitution by calling it a “living document,” meaning it grows and changes along with the rest of us. Only, it does not. Except, of course, through the constitutional amendment process, which has notched some pretty marvelous human advancements such as, say, abolishing slavery and allowing women to drink.
The whole point of the Constitution is that it does not change. It expresses universal, unwavering principles and protections under which we all agree to operate. Those principles of our Constitution protect the basic rights of everyone who comes together to toil under our Constitution.
If the Constitution were to change according to the whims and fancies of the loudest voices or greediest politicians, then we would no longer have a constitution or any of the protections contained in it.
The first big public victory for the Ouija board anti-constitutionalists came in 1987 when they defeated the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court because he believed that, indeed, the Constitution really does mean what it says. Otherwise, you know, why have a constitution? Or a court? Or a legislature or a president, for that matter?
An “originalist,” they smeared him.
But the bald stupidity and flagrant dishonesty of Democrats is not the most astonishing thing about this whole debate.
What’s even more amazing than Democrats building their judicial philosophy around the fantastical notion that the Constitution does not mean what it actually says is that for more than 30 years, Republicans have managed to find a way to lose this debate. I mean, seriously, how do you lose an argument this dumb?
It is an absurd lie on its face. If a nominee does not believe the Constitution means what it says, how can that nominee even be allowed to take the oath to “support and defend” the document that he or she doesn’t believe in?
If you were interviewing someone to sell shoes in the shoe department at Macy’s, and an applicant came in and said he did not believe in selling shoes — certainly not for Macy’s — and that, in fact, he doesn’t even believe people should wear shoes, would you hire him?
Yet, in Washington, hundreds of such applicants have made it onto the federal bench after testifying they do not believe in the Constitution they are supposed to “support and defend.” An alarming number have made it onto the Supreme Court.
Sure, Republicans have won a few fights over the decades, but more often, they lose.
It wasn’t until former President Donald Trump came along that sanity finally prevailed in Washington, and Republicans established a 6-3 majority on the court that believes the Constitution means what it actually says. And Mr. Trump didn’t even go to law school!
Now comes an even more deranged generation of Ouija board anti-constitutionalists. They don’t even claim allegiance to the “living document” judicial philosophy. They are nothing more than political hacks, vowing to carry out Democrats’ partisan agenda from the bench.
Asked last week about her judicial philosophy, Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson claimed to openly embrace “originalism.”
“I believe that the Constitution is fixed in its meaning,” she testified.
“I believe that it’s appropriate to look at the original intent — original public meaning — of the words when one is trying to assess because, again, that’s a limitation on my authority to import my own policy.”
This is a fairly stark departure from most Democrat judges.
But in the very same hearings, Judge Jackson also pledged allegiance to partisan Democrat political ideology by openly embracing this equally lunatic notion that human gender does not exist.
“I am not a biologist,” she hilariously claimed, cementing herself in history as the most ridiculous jurist to ever make it onto the federal bench.
After all, it is impossible to be a constitutional “originalist” if you don’t have the sense to be a biological “originalist.”
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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