Why This Election’s Battle For The Supreme Court Matters More Than Anything Else
The Supreme Court is on the ballot right now.
The left has made their goals abundantly clear: end the current Court majority at all costs. The Biden administration only failed to pack the Court due to the opposition of two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, to ending the filibuster in the Senate.
However, a hand-picked commission on the Supreme Court came up with a court-packing scheme that would have given Biden unprecedented power to reshape the court for generations.
Should the Democrats win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in less than three weeks, expect the filibuster to be ended when they take office, guaranteeing the court-packing scheme to be implemented.
This has led to untrue attacks on individual conservative justices to justify forcing them from the Court or negating their influence by packing it.
It has also led to unprecedented leakage of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade well before its publication. The Dobbs leak was designed to create sufficient public pressure to reconsider the decision with an attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family’s lives resulting from it.
A less publicized leak earlier this year concerning a memo that Chief Justice John Roberts sent to his fellow justices on the handling of cases involving former President Donald Trump’s immunity from prosecution claims related to actions he took in office was designed to undermine the decisions of the court and trust in the institution.
This ideological bomb-throwing by either liberal justices or their clerks has one purpose: to destroy the court to justify packing it.
This is why Congress should take action to move forward on the Keep Nine constitutional amendment, which puts court packing to rest forever. The language would simply add the number of Supreme Court Justices to the U.S. Constitution, ending threatened political manipulation of the court to suit partisan needs.
However, the reasons behind the big government left’s desperation to end the current majority on the court are also found in some of the critical rulings they have made, which transitioned power from both the court and the administrative state to the people.
In Dobbs, the decision transferred the decision on abortion to the states, so people’s elected representatives or through direct vote mechanisms, the people themselves decide for their state.
In a variety of Second Amendment cases ranging from the Heller decision to the more recent New York Rifle and Pistol Association decision, the individual rights of citizens to keep and bear arms have been affirmed, with state and local government attempts to abridge them being declared unconstitutional. Not shockingly, politicians like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have supported rioters burning down cities over the police who are sworn to protect those very cities, also want to subject individuals to the tyranny of the mob with no hope of help from 911 — no matter what the Jennifer Love Hewitt television show would tell you.
States, like Washington and Colorado, seeking to end religious conscience rights guaranteed under the First Amendment have been slapped around by the court as individual freedom to practice religion has been upheld in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and the Kennedy v. Bremerton wherein Joe Kennedy, who was fired for praying after a high school football he was coaching (to learn more about this case by seeing the just-released movie ‘Average Joe’.)
Perhaps the most dramatic action by the Supreme Court from a strictly limited government perspective has been its decisions in the West Virginia v. EPA case and in the joint cases – Relentless v. Dept of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
West Virginia v. EPA struck down a major regulation promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency because it went beyond the authority granted by Congress. This restoration of the power of the people’s elected representatives over the permanent bureaucracy was transformational.
However, when coupled with the Relentless and Loper Bright cases, the administrative state's iron-fisted rule has ended. Relentless and Loper overturned a forty-year court precedent, resulting in one of the largest power grabs in American history – the so-called Chevron deference. Chevron's deference has meant that in a legal dispute between the federal bureaucracy and anyone else, the federal bureaucracy had to be deferred to legally.
The combination of West Virginia v. EPA and the end of Chevron deference gives the limited, constitutional government a fighting chance in our legal system. In contrast, before, the ever-growing, liberty-encroaching federal government was an almost guaranteed winner.
This election is a battle over whether constitutionally guaranteed liberties will survive.
Kamala Harris and the left want to pack the Court to end religious conscience freedoms, curtail the individual right to keep and bear arms, and end the restoration of the power of the people through their elected Congress over the power of the unelected bureaucracy.
That’s why any candidate for Congress who refuses to say they oppose packing the Supreme Court and refuse to say they will support the Keep Nine amendment cannot be trusted with the keys to unlock — or lock up — your liberty.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
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