The law would allow people to vote without an ID if they sign a statement averring their identity. It would expand regulation and government censorship of campaigns and political activity and speech, and it would require states to allow felons to vote—a proposal several pandering Democratic presidential candidates, such as Kamala Harris, have said they would support.21 It would prevent election officials from checking the eligibility and qualifications of voters and removing ineligible voters. It would degrade the accuracy of registration lists by automatically registering people from state databases, including large numbers of ineligible voters and noncitizens. It would facilitate voter fraud by mandating same-day voter registration, giving election officials insufficient time to verify the accuracy of the registration information.22
Despite all this, the bill passed the House 234 to 193. The website American Commitment explains in lay terms what the bill would do if passed into law. It would:
use YOUR tax dollars to support political candidates you don’t agree with;
regulate speech that mentions a federal candidate or elected official at any time;
regulate the online speech of American citizens;
end the long-standing parity in the campaign finance law between corporations and unions;
turn the Federal Election Commission from a balanced board of three Republicans and three Democrats into a partisan commission with a 3-2 majority;
mandate that all states adopt same day voter registration, automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and other provisions that undermine election integrity;
mandate that all states adopt redistricting commissions that take the power to draw congressional districts away from our elected state officials and give it to unelected bureaucrats;
declare that Congress supports DC statehood.23
In short, it’s a glorified Democratic power grab. “The Democrats intend to save ‘democracy’ by putting themselves in charge of elections,” writes Jarrett Stepman of the Daily Signal.24 Even the left-leaning ACLU has slammed the bill as unconstitutional, saying it would gravely damage the First Amendment. “[It] will have the effect of harming our public discourse by silencing necessary voices that would otherwise speak out about the public issues of the day,” writes the ACLU’s national political director and legislative counsel.25
On court-packing, three current or former Democratic presidential candidates—Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren—say they’d be open to adding judges to the Supreme Court, while Senator Cory Booker says he supports term limits for Supreme Court justices.26 South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg, another Democratic presidential candidate, favors expanding the bench from nine to fifteen justices. The current proposal is that each party would pick five justices and those ten justices would pick the remaining five. This would blatantly violate the Constitution, which provides that the president nominates the justices with the advice and consent of the Senate. But once again, constitutional niceties have to take a back seat to the Democrats’ political calculations—they are advancing this proposal in fear of a sustained conservative majority on the Court.
Another proposal, which has been endorsed by all Democratic presidential candidates, is statehood for Washington, D.C. As the Constitution requires a separate capital district, which could not be changed absent a constitutional amendment, this proposal is another clever plot to circumvent the system by shrinking the district to the small area surrounding the White House, the Capitol Building, and the National Mall, with the remaining area constituting a new, heavily Democratic state.
Yet another Democratic attempt to game the vote is evident in the census controversy mentioned earlier. When President Trump requested that the 2020 U.S. Census include a citizenship question, Democrats objected, saying it would make immigrants less likely to respond. They also raised privacy concerns—as if any U.S. citizen would have a reasonable expectation of privacy about his citizenship status. Democrats hope to have illegals and noncitizens counted because states’ electoral votes and some federal funding are determined by their population, and they believe counting illegal aliens would mean more electoral votes apportioned to blue states and those trending blue. But with a citizenship question included, illegal immigrants may not respond, which would have the opposite effect.27
“This is a craven attack on our democracy and a transparent attempt to intimidate immigrant communities,” said DNC chairman Tom Perez. “The census is a constitutionally-mandated count of all U.S. residents, not a political tool for Donald Trump to push his agenda and disempower Latinos and other people of color.”28 There you have it in plain prose. The leader of the Democratic Party wants to empower illegal immigrants in the name of “our democracy.”
Some other left-wing proposals are bizarre and, if taken seriously, disturbing. Professor Eric W. Orts of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has suggested thwarting the ironclad provision in the Constitution guaranteeing that each state shall have two senators. Instead, states would be given a number of senators equal to their percentage of the nation’s population, so that California, for example, would have twelve.29 How convenient. It’s a stunning coincidence, no doubt, that it would make the Senate dramatically bluer overnight.
JUDICIAL ACTIVISM
For decades, the left has displayed its authoritarian impulse in supporting and practicing judicial activism to advance policies it cannot secure through legislation. In the Trump era, judicial activism occurs as it has under previous presidents. For example, a federal judge in New York struck down President Trump’s above referenced attempt to place a citizenship question on the census form, holding it was an arbitrary and capricious rule.30
But judicial activism during the Trump presidency has sometimes occurred in an alarmingly more expansive form. When courts thwarted Trump’s lawfully issued administrative rules allowing employers and universities to cease providing insurance coverage for birth control, a federal court in Pennsylvania didn’t just block the rule locally but applied its injunction nationally. This was after another ambitious injunction from a California judge blocked the rules in thirteen states and the District of Columbia. As usual, the left characterized the courts’ rulings as a vindication of people’s rights—without expressing the slightest concern about the courts’ overreach. “It is a good day when a court stops this administration from sanctioning discrimination under the guise of religion or morality,” said the ACLU. “We applaud the order to enjoin the enforcement of these discriminatory rules.”31 So a rule exempting entities from being compelled to violate their consciences is discriminatory and a fraudulent invocation of religion or morality? There’s no end to the left’s distortions—not to mention its assaults on the Constitution.
This Pennsylvania example is not an isolated case. The left has essentially weaponized universal injunctions to empower just one of the nation’s six hundred federal district judges hearing a case involving specific litigants to block the president from enforcing or implementing a law, regulation, or executive policy nationwide. This is a monumental usurpation of power by a tiny fraction of the judiciary that can cripple action by the executive or legislative branches. It has been employed from the travel ban to DACA to the issue of transgenders serving in the military. Observers note this could have especially dangerous foreign policy implications, as a single judge could substitute his judgment for that of the commander in chief.
Unheard of for the first 175 years of the Republic, such nationwide injunctions were used twenty-two times in the first two years of the Trump administration, though Trump’s predecessors were not stymied so frequently. Congressman Bob Goodlatte introduced the Injunctive Authority Clarification Act of 2018 to prohibit the issuance of national injunctions except in certain specified situations, but the bill did not advance through Congress.32
Judicial activism is almost exclusively the province of the left, though leftists have distorted the term to argue that conservatives are eq
ually guilty of the practice. Judicial invalidation of a law on constitutional grounds is not judicial activism. That judicial prerogative has been enshrined in constitutional jurisprudence since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which held, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”33 Judicial activism occurs when judges rewrite laws based on their policy preferences rather than on constitutional grounds, often twisting the plain meaning of constitutional provisions to pretend there is a constitutional basis for their decisions. It happens when judges overturn or uphold laws on specious constitutional grounds in order to achieve a desired policy result.34
If the Supreme Court eventually strikes down the landmark abortion case of Roe v. Wade, for example, the Orwellian left will decry “conservative judicial activism.” But while Roe has been the law of the land for almost fifty years, it was never good law because the court manufactured constitutional provisions (emanations and penumbras). If the court finally invalidated the law, it would restore sound constitutional principles—a reversal of a former court’s judicial activism, not judicial activism itself. Yes, the principle of stare decisis requires deference to long-established precedent, but it doesn’t bind future courts to legal fictions. That means nothing to leftists, however. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand flatly said that pro-life supporters should not be judges and compared their beliefs to “racism,”35 accusing them of being “too backward looking.”36
FAIR-WEATHER RESPECTERS OF THE CONSTITUTION
One creative scheme to tilt the elections to the Democrats involved New Jersey legislators attempting to remove President Trump’s name from their state’s ballot through legislation requiring presidential and vice-presidential candidates to disclose their federal income tax returns.37 California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a similar bill, though it would only keep Trump’s name off the primary ballot, not the general election ballot. Although Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, was one of America’s most liberal governors, even he had denounced the antidemocratic nature of such laws when he rejected one in 2017. Noting the measure’s likely political intent and questionable constitutionality, he declared, “A qualified candidate’s ability to appear on the ballot is fundamental to our democratic system. For that reason, I hesitate to start down a road that well might lead to an ever-escalating set of differing state requirements for presidential candidates.”38
All these ploys would diminish the electoral power of law-respecting adult voters, thus showing the left’s willingness to subordinate anything to its political agenda. Leftists’ efforts to scrap the Electoral College disrespect the framers’ healthy skepticism of pure democracy. Their comprehensive scheme to relax voting requirements on age, citizenship, criminal record, and proof of voter identification demonstrates their contempt for the rule of law. If illegal immigrants from the southern border tilted Republican, Democrats would likely be rabid border enforcement fanatics.39 Nothing is sacred for the tradition-scoffing Democratic Party, so structural changes to our constitutional and electoral systems are just another day at the office.
If Democrats were champions of democracy as they would have us believe, they wouldn’t support measures designed to undermine it by relaxing basic voting requirements. They wouldn’t be such staunch advocates of an activist judiciary, which constitutes an ongoing assault on the will of the people through their duly elected representatives. They also wouldn’t support delegating vast powers to unelected, unaccountable administrative agencies. Democrats favor the Constitution’s prescribed democratic features when they serve their political agenda and oppose them when they do not.
In an interview with the Washington Post, presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke admitted his cynical ambivalence about the Constitution. He asked whether “an empire like ours” with its expansive military presence and trade and security agreements around the world could “still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago.”40 It always amazes me that leftists don’t seem to grasp that the Constitution is a document that establishes the structure of government rather than a super-code of detailed legislation governing every specific problem. Leftists resent that the Constitution restricts their ability to make sweeping changes that would shrink our liberties and so, like O’Rourke, they’ll sometimes voice their frustration at its structural limitations.
What O’Rourke is really saying, as President Obama sometimes did in his candid moments, is that he wishes this annoying piece of paper didn’t hinder the advancement of the glorious, utopian leftist agenda. If he had his druthers, he’d eliminate those parts of it that impede leftist social planners from acquiring further power. The framers provided methods for amending the Constitution, which are deliberately cumbersome. We should be grateful for this. Otherwise the individual liberties the Constitution guarantees would be even less secure. In the next chapter we’ll see more proof of the left’s authoritarian proclivities and its disturbing trend of censoring speech through private sector action and intimidation.
CHAPTER TWELVE Leftist Authoritarianism Goes Private
“I’D LOVE TO BE ABLE TO REGULATE SPEECH”
Democratic congressman Ted Lieu, a leftist’s leftist, conceded he’d like to suppress Americans’ free speech. “I would love to be able to regulate the content of speech,” Lieu told CNN after denying claims that Google does just that. “The First Amendment prevents me from doing so. And that’s simply a function of the First Amendment. But I think over the long run, it’s better that government does not regulate the content of speech.” So, in his heart of hearts, he would like to suppress speech but accepts the constitutional prohibition against it. That’s a lot different from saying, “I wish everyone would agree with my political beliefs.” This is wishing he could force them to agree or shut up.
But Lieu went further, saying he’d have no problem with the private sector acting as a speech censor, which is troubling given the power and reach of social media megafirms. Having just defended Google against the charge of censorship, he proclaimed, “I would urge these private sector companies to regulate it themselves. But it’s really nothing I believe government can do. And so that’s been my position all along.”1 Lieu seems totally oblivious to the horrors of his authoritarian impulse.
HATE-FILLED LEFTIST FLASH MOBS
The day after the press first reported the manufactured scandal against the MAGA hat–wearing Covington Catholic students, Democratic congressman John Yarmuth tweeted, “I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of teenagers wearing MAGA hats until we can figure out what is going on. They seem to be poisoning young minds. The conduct we saw in this video is beyond appalling, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is a direct result of the racist hatred displayed by the President of the United States who, sadly, some mistake for a role model.”2
This is another chilling illustration of the tyrannical leftist mind-set. Denouncing Trump supporters—half of all Americans—as hateful racists, a congressman advocates forcibly muzzling them due to false reports that a group of them acted improperly. How often do conservatives propose banning liberal speech or dress because they find it offensive? It is leftists who seek to suppress conservative speech, spuriously claiming it is hate speech that leads to violence. We saw this clearly when President Trump, on Twitter, juxtaposed an image of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar dismissively referring to the tragic events of 9/11 as “some people did something” with an image of the actual 9/11 attack. Posturing Democrats claimed Trump was inciting violence against Omar—and of course, they claimed it was racist.
AOC said Trump’s criticism of Omar was “incitement of violence against a progressive woman of color.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted, “The president is actively and willfully endangering the life of a member of Congress.” Democratic presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke piled on with the same inflammatory message, as did Congressman Joe Kennedy III.3 If this is considered an incitement to violence, Democrats have incited violen
ce against Trump every day of his presidency. But it’s absurd. This is how the left forms choruses—like flash mobs—to intimidate opponents and quash their free speech. Omar’s comment was ghastly, and it was perfectly appropriate for the president to expose the outrage.
For a real-life example of hateful speech, as opposed to the expression of an idea the left disputes, consider the left’s vicious attack on Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a decorated Navy Seal who lost an eye in Afghanistan, for posting a video in which he criticized Omar’s callousness. “It’s terrorists who killed almost 3,000 Americans, we should talk about it that way. We should talk about it with deference,” said Crenshaw. His comments unleashed a storm of vulgar abuse from the left. Talia Lavin, a former New York University journalism professor, called Crenshaw “captain sh*thead.” Freelance writer Rob Rousseau wrote to Crenshaw, “You’re deliberately lying about what [Omar] said you eyeless f*ck.” Political cartoonist Eli Valley chimed in, “Wow, it’s GOP-Nazi Party Terrorist Incitement Night on NBC.” And Ryan Cooper of The Week called Crenshaw’s comments “fascist propaganda.”4 Note that despite their vile condemnations of Crenshaw’s innocuous comments, no one is suggesting these crude loudmouths be denied their First Amendment freedoms.
The thrust of the First Amendment’s free-expression guarantees is to protect political speech, which wouldn’t need protection if it were never controversial. Leftists’ efforts to censor speech they dislike, carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that only one political ideology would be protected. It’s a bit rich for the left to complain about the poisoning of young minds as leftists in academia, our public schools, the media, and Hollywood endlessly disseminate leftist bile.
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 31