#NeverTrump could set a regrettable precedent

The Unablogger

After having earlier supported Ben Carson (until his ignorance about foreign policy was exposed), then Scott Walker (until his campaign imploded and he withdrew) and Marco Rubio (until his campaign imploded and strategic voting required a different choice), I cast my vote in the Missouri Primary for Ted Cruz. He was the best chance to stop Donald Trump, and he would have made an excellent president. I don’t like Trump. I still haven’t resolved for whom I am voting in November.

However, the budding movement to change the convention rules after the fact in order to deny Trump the nomination he won with the votes of legitimate (albeit misguided) primary voters and caucus attendees is the wrong thing to do. Yes, I realize that younger generations believe that the ends justify the means, but they’re wrong.

There are two major reasons the convention’s #NeverTrump movement must fail. First, and most obviously, it would make the likely Democrat landslide this November even worse.The erstwhile reliably Republican voters who won’t vote Trump but who would return to fold for virtually any other nominee will be outnumbered by the millions of Trump supporters who would abandon the GOP. If you deny Trump’s supporters what they won fair and square, they’ll bolt. And while most #NeverTrumpers will nevertheless vote for the rest of the Republican ticket, most of the cheated Trumpkins will not. That would lead to a Democratic senate (perhaps even with a filibuster-proof majority) and a Democratic House. Such a scenario would empower the Democrats to pass their entire left-wing wish list into law, whether constitutional or not. A filibuster-proof senate would be primed to confirm the most leftist justices imaginable, who would immediately bless the new administration’s blatant overreach and be young enough to plague society for a generation. Such a court would regard the Constitution as an archaic, unbinding relic, replaced instead by a moving “living, breathing” standard of “public policy.” No overreaching action by either Congress or the president would be unlawful, as long as it was consistent with the public policy desired by the Democratic Party. It would not be beyond such a court to rule portions of the Constitution itself unconstitutional.

A Trump-led electoral bloodbath would not lose 14 senate seats to create the filibuster-proof senate. A “dump Trump” nominee would.

But the second reason risks even more dire consequences. Denying Trump the nomination he has already won (or even an unsuccessful coup attempt) would set a dangerous precedent, by Republicans no less, for Democrats to use as an excuse to impose their own will. There is a plausible theory (which I am not yet prepared to accept) that Trump will win in a landslide, powered by blue-collar former Democrats and foreshadowed by the unforeseen success of the Brexit referendum in Great Britain. Establishment Democrats, especially President Obama, are so obsessed with the perceived evil of Trump (or any Republican who would trespass on the presidency to which their nominee is “entitled”), that they will do anything – anything – to prevent it from happening. If the voting public goes off script and delivers an inconvenient Election Day surprise, cue the contrived violent protesters to provide the pretense for lame duck President Obama to declare martial law, and put the “proper” people in charge. If the Republicans can entertain the idea (even if unsuccessful) of reversing the results of their nominating process, reversing an election with martial law would be a piece of cake. So would end the American republic as we know it.

Democrats bork themselves

The Unablogger

The passing of Judge Robert Bork is a sad day for conservatives and all of America. The country will forever suffer the lost opportunity to have had his intellect and principled guidance on our highest court. Democrats rewrote the rule book to deny him his rightful place on the Supreme Court.

The Senate’s refusal to confirm President Reagan’s nomination of Bork to the high court caused Reagan to settle for a less principled choice, Anthony Kennedy, a moderate who would become the court’s “swing vote” for over twenty years.

But now, Bork’s passing has its own ironic revenge. Had he been on the court, his death would have created a vacancy from the conservative wing during the presidency of a liberal Democrat with a liberal Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. It would have given President Obama the ability to turn the court’s majority over to the liberal wing, something statists and other liberals have craved ever since President Nixon changed the court’s course by naming Warren Burger to replace Earl Warren as chief justice. It would have marked a Democrat President’s first opportunity to replace a conservative justice with a liberal since 1967, when Lyndon Johnson named Thurgood Marshall to succeed Tom Clark. Conservatives would retake that seat in 1990, when Marshall was succeeded by Clarence Thomas.

But that liberal opportunity is not to be, at least not just now, and it isn’t to be because liberal Democrats refused to do the right thing in 1987. If they had followed time-honored precedent, the impeccable legal credentials of Bork would have required them to confirm, in spite of the senators’ philosophic and political differences with the judge, just as senators of both parties had done repeatedly in the past. But no, liberal Democrats, led by a young prospective presidential contender named Joe Biden, played politics and changed the unwritten rules to deny Bork the position he deserved.

What the Democrats and the nation got instead was Kennedy, who besides being more moderate was also nine years younger than Bork. Kennedy remains very much alive and still on the court. And thanks to another wrongful Democratic act, Kennedy isn’t even a swing vote any more. That second act was President Obama’s attempt to bully the court into submission to his agenda. He singled the court out for criticism in his 2010 State of the Union speech, which hardened the resolve of the court’s conservative wing. It especially angered Kennedy, who has been a more reliable conservative vote ever since.

What goes around comes around. Yes, America misses the well-reasoned conservative decisions that a Justice Bork would have rendered for some 25 years. He is gone now, and he is missed. But the guy we had to “settle” for lives on, stronger than ever.  Obama and Biden inadvertently did their parts, some 22 years apart, to preserve the conservative edge on the Supreme Court today.