Their Rantings Betray Them - New English Review

By flaring up like aroused peacocks over replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Democrats are committing the tactical error of being drawn into battle on ground less favorable than that which they already occupy.

by Conrad Black

The compulsive and self-righteous bellicosity of the Democratic leaders in Congress over the Supreme Court vacancy has opened an opportunity for President Trump to strike decisively. It is admittedly controversial for a president to fill a high court vacancy starting six weeks before a presidential election, but it is entirely constitutional. What’s more, it has applicable precedents, including most conspicuously the elevation of Chief Justice John Marshall by President John Adams after he had been defeated in the 1800 election.

This is not a provocation to justify the extreme belligerency of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Sharing the spotlight (for once) with the leader of the young radical socialists who are eating through the flabby undercarriage of the Democrats like saprophytes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Schumer announced over the weekend that if the president proceeded, “Nothing is off the table.” Pelosi added, “We have many arrows in our quiver,” hinting that impeachments could be launched against the president and Attorney General William Barr. (The Republican majority in the Senate would rightly refuse to consider such rubbish, again.)

They effectively acknowledged that they have no ability to stop the president from filling the vacancy even if the process is concluded after the election, whatever its outcome for the White House and the Senate.

After 18 months of ridiculing Trump as a crooked and stupid buffoon, the Democrats arose from their torpor after his election like the nation responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor. An unprecedented and febrile resistance has been thrown up with the Russian collusion fraud and the spurious impeachment and now the terror campaign on the coronavirus. Such is their state of churlish frustration, they are now waving their fists at the sky like King Lear and promising vengeance should the president have the effrontery to exercise his constitutional right and duty.

It is nonsense because obviously if the Democrats win the White House and Senate in November, they will do everything they can do to ensure that no such phenomenon as Donald Trump appears again, no matter what he does with the Supreme Court vacancy. Of course they will pack the Supreme Court (as FDR attempted in 1937), try to abolish the Electoral College, try to add four Democratic senators from the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as new states, entrench their ability to enumerate as many illegal immigrants as necessary to ensure victory in almost all elections, and set up a mailed-ballot voting system guaranteeing that—if need be—victory will be delivered by the ardently Democratic and vastly over-numerous postal workers’ union, deterred by “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night.”

By confessing their own impotence opposite the president and the Republican senators’ ability to name and confirm a Supreme Court justice, Schumer and Pelosi have merely revealed what obviously has been the design of the Democratic Party elders for some time—to reassert their control of the permanent and practically unlimited state. No one should doubt that a possible radical change in the tide of government and administration in the vast American state may now impend.

Roosevelt arrived in 1933 with an unlimited mandate to reconstruct a collapsed financial system, save the proverbial “one-third of a nation” with no visible means of support, and rebuild American national morale and faith in itself and its national destiny, which in the pale of the Great Depression, was no longer manifest. After Roosevelt, the state grew and grew and was permanently manned and occupied more and more exclusively by Democrats, both in the higher echelons of permanent appointees, and at the grassroots of the bureaucracy by citizens of the overwhelmingly African American District of Columbia.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a capable and respected but not particularly active or overly partisan president, was the perfect interregnum, fulfilling the requirement of intermittent Republican occupation of the White House without disturbing the government beneath him.

Richard Nixon, more politically involved and forced to fight desperately to win the presidency by a hair’s breadth, started to threaten the Democratic octopus-state, but briefly lost his sense of self-preservation and permitted a trivial episode he had nothing to do with (Watergate’s forced entry) to destroy his career.

Ronald Reagan, who frightened the Democrats for a time, railed against the federal government even six years after his inauguration. He was an outstanding president but was satisfied to revive the economy with lower taxes and win the Cold War, without disturbing the slumbering Democratic giant, evermore bloated, that ostensibly he ostensibly led.

The Bushes, like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, were not especially partisan and had no great public following, unlike Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan, and Trump. They were a loyal opposition that fulfilled the need for token bipartisanship, and both McCain and Romney defected to the Democrats when they were most needed. They did not attempt seriously to retard the progress of the administrative state as it moved relentlessly leftward, fostering welfare addiction and atomizing more and more aggrieved groups to fragment the silent majority of Americans, adding them to the Democratic coalition of special interests and its permanent majority. The Bushes at least tried to prevent an executive takeover of the Supreme Court (via Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and sometimes, Chief Justice John Roberts).

The campaign the Democratic media and politicians have conducted to terrorize the whole country about the coronavirus has been, lamentably, somewhat successful—despite the small odds of a fatality and the concentration of vulnerability in one-fifth of the population that it is relatively easy to protect without shutting down the entire economy and inducing a back-breaking depression, and despite the likely imminence of an effective vaccine.

The spectacle of their presidential nominee Joe Biden meandering into sparsely attended meetings of widely separated, carefully selected partisans standing in well-marked circles and his haltingly addressing them while masked (although there is no evidence that in these circumstances a mask is necessary) should have struck the country as histrionic and cowardly. But the feverishly partisan Democratic media propaganda machine has convinced a depressing number of Americans that this is a reasonable response to the coronavirus.

Now, fortune has again changed sides in a similar fateful intervention.

As COVID-19 turned a won election for Trump into an uphill battle, the knee-jerk response of the Democratic leadership to the death of Ginsburg is an electoral bonanza for their mortal enemy. After being tortured on the wheel of their treachery over the bunk about colluding with the Kremlin and soliciting assistance from the Ukrainian president, while heavily encumbered by his own lack of Washington experience and public relations talent beyond the glossy and tabloid sensationalism of a Manhattan celebrity, Donald Trump has been armed by his enemies with a potentially deadly weapon.

The panic betrayed by Schumer and Pelosi’s threats and ravings is not misplaced.

First published in American Greatness.