Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Despite the leak of the Court’s Dobbs decision that sparked widespread illegal intimidation and threats against Supreme Court Justices, including an assassination attempt; and despite the “days of rage” and violent vandalism and fire-bombings of dozens of pro-life clinics and churches, the five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey have held firm.
Consequently, they have corrected the unconstitutional decisions that legalized the killing of unborn human beings. The squeamish Chief Justice John Roberts, however, though upholding the Mississippi law, voted with the three progressives to let Roe stand, showing again his need to protect the court from controversy even at the expense of the Constitution.
Along with the earlier repudiation of New York’s gun-law that redefined the Second Amendment as limited by the whims of politicians, and the shooting down of Maine’s discrimination against religious schools that weakened the First Amendment, this decision is a giant step toward restoring integrity to the highest law of the land and its protection of our unalienable rights in the Bill of Rights.
No doubt we will read reams of commentary analyzing the decision, including incessant hysterical clichés about “coat-hangers,” “back alleys,” and “women’s lives at risk,” as Joe Biden screeched. Nor can we discount the possibility of more violence from the “woke” Stalinists. But those barking dogs will not stop the judicial caravan.
This sea-change in the Court happened for one reason: Donald Trump’s appointments of three originalist Justices. Because of Trump, the progressives’ tactic of torturing a “living Constitution” to create new rights from verbal “penumbras” and “emanations” has been dramatically rebuked.
But one simple fact should be emphasized: these landmark decisions long desired by Republican conservatives (definitely not a redundancy) would not have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the election. Nor would federalism been strengthened by returning decisions about conflicting and passionate issue to the states, where such political decisions are accountable to the sovereign people and their votes.
So the question now is will the NeverTrumpers admit their irrational animus against Donald Trump would have saddled the Republic with another doctrinaire progressive, if the voters had not possessed enough common sense and practical wisdom to elect Trump? Would Clinton have nominated originalist Justices or delivered the policies that conservative Republicans have worked to achieve for decades?
But it’s not just about guns, religious schools, and abortions, though all those decisions involve overturning laws that violate our unalienable rights. It’s also about Biden and his handlers’ willful reversal of Donald Trump’s other achievements as president.
The Dems inherited an economy that, though stunned by covid and feckless shutdowns, was primed to improve now that the pandemic has waned. However, instead of continuing Trump’s policies on taxes and energy and deregulation that created a thriving economy, we got the Biden administration’s reversal of Trump’s pro-American policies on the economy and enegy.
As a result, we went from being potentially energy independent and the world’s biggest exporter of fossil fuels, to record prices for a gallon of gas, and the humiliating spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world becoming an international mendicant begging the Saudis and even thug-states like Venezuela and Iran to produce more oil, at the same time he shuts down domestic production.
And why? All we ever hear from Republican NeverTrumpers are virtue-signaling complaints about matters of style and decorum, and pious paeans to some “democratic norms,” along with question-begging epithets like “fascist” and “racist.” In other words, matters of style and manners rather than substance and actions.
The NeverTrumpers forgot that their silo of credentialed cognitive elites and its bipartisan guild protocols is not America. It is just one of many diverse ways of being American. So NeverTrumpers, by attacking those “other” Americans’ champion and voice, were insulting those voters as much as Hillary did with her “basket of deplorables,” or Obama with his “bitter clingers to guns and religion.” People who don’t have a college education still know when they’re being talked down and condescended to. And they don’t like it.
In fact, Republican NeverTrumpers sound more like progressive technocrats, rather than one of many “factions,” motivated by Madison’s conflicting “passions and interests.” Our Republic was designed not to homogenize we the people into a “single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive,” as Woodrow Wilson envisioned, but to check and balance factional “passions and interests” in order to protect liberty and forestall tyranny.
They also forgot that ever since ancient Athens, the incorporation of the masses despite their lack of education, wealth, or aristocratic status, required free speech, which meant accepting a wide diversity of styles and standards of decorum rather than privileging one standard, since “decorum” often functions as a gate-keeping device to silence free speech. But as Sophocles said, “Free men have free tongues,” and it’s always tyrants who want to shut them up. That’s why the “woke” want social media and universities to limit free speech to expressions of “woke” ideology, and censor other speech that challenges it.
Finally, we must not forget that the NeverTrump Republican phenomenon exposed how, unlike Democrats, too many Republicans are willing to give comfort to the other side. Whether out of a “bipartisan” fetish predicated on the mistaken idea that they are supposed to “solve problems” rather than defend the Constitution against tyranny; or fear of becoming the object of the anger and invective of “woke” media, universities, celebrities, and deep-pockets corporate boards, too often Republicans will give Democrats a win by voting for some dubious piece of legislation.
The most recent is the gun-law bill, supported by 15 Republican Senators, that bribes states to implement “red flag” laws. These are rife with the moral hazard of subjecting innocent gun-owners to proving that they are not incipient mass murderers, at the cost of damaging their reputations, and wasting their time and money as they are caught up in some Kafkaesque “due process.” Worst, these laws will not stop murderers, including school-shooters, who even if their guns are confiscated, are fiendishly clever at finding others.
Worse yet, rarely do Democrats reciprocate such “bipartisan” consideration, and the number of contemporary elected Democrats who do can be counted on one hand. Or how many Supreme Court Justices appointed by Democrats since World War II have gone over to the conservative side? The answer is one: Roe dissenter Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, appointed by JFK. Compare him to the several Justices appointed by Republicans who, like Chief Justice Roberts, frequently side with progressives. And who are progressive equivalents of NeverTrump Republicans, many of whom actually voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, despite their track-record of incompetence and grifting?
Donald Trump exposed these Republican Petainists, and he paid the political price. If they have any shame, they will at least acknowledge that the landmark rejection of Roe v. Wade, for which conservatives have labored for nearly 50 years, happened only because Donald Trump, with no help from them, defeated Hillary Clinton. But given that inveterate NeverTrump National Review’s editorial celebrating the Dobbs decision says not a word about the man who made it possible, don’t hold your breath.
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