Harsanyi: It Looks Like Democrats Are Expecting the Supreme Court to Follow Their Marching Orders
The fact that the Supreme Court hasn’t yet ruled on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health abortion case didn’t stop Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from attempting to delegitimize the decision, accusing Justice Brett Kavanaugh of being “credibly accused of sexual assault on multiple accounts” with “corroborated details.”
Yet the court, says Ocasio-Cortez, “is letting him decide on whether to legalize forced birth in the US.”
Reminder that Brett Kavanaugh *still* remains credibly accused of sexual assault on multiple accounts w/ corroborated details & this year the FBI admitted it never fully investigated.
Yet the court is letting him decide on whether to legalize forced birth in the US. No recusal.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2021
Of course, “credibly accused” is not any kind of legal standard, unlike, say, due process and the presumption of innocence. Indeed, there is nothing to investigate because there are no “corroborated details” that sustain Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh.
Ford alleged to have “100 percent” certitude that Kavanaugh had assaulted her in the 1980s, yet she possessed 0 percent memory of any details that could have substantiated her claim — not even a time or a place.
Every witness she maintained had been at the suburban Maryland party where the alleged attack occurred has denied knowledge of the assault and recollection of the get-together. This includes Blasey Ford’s then-best friend Leland Keyser. No witness could even confirm that Blasey Ford had ever met Kavanaugh.
In the hierarchy of “rights,” abortion apparently sits above all others. In the mind of Democrats, then, originalist justices who may potentially overturn Roe v. Wade aren’t merely wrong, they’re nefarious extremists and thus any smear tactic is justified in the campaign to stop them.
The groundwork for Ocasio-Cortez to delegitimize the Supreme Court was laid by Democratic senators before Blasey Ford or Julie Swetnick emerged and then-Sen. Kamala Harris was reading wholly unsubstantiated gang rape charges against Kavanaugh into the congressional record. There were ludicrous hearings about yearbook jokes and drunken parties that were only meant to discredit any future decisions by the court.
Then there were the extraconstitutional standards Democrats kept inventing. Any nominee of a president who was “under suspicion” of criminality — these were the days when Russian collusion was still a thing — were “illegitimate.” Sen. Ed Markey argued that Kavanaugh’s nomination was “illegitimate” because the president was “all but named as a co-conspirator” in federal crimes.
Ah, the constitutional “all but” standard.
CNN’s lascivious chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, who has a personal stake in liberal abortion laws, would go on to claim that “40 percent of the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct,” which is a good reminder that Justice Clarence Thomas was also smeared in much the same way.
Despite hagiographic accounts of the incident, Anita Hill was not a “credible” accuser, either. To this day, no credible person — and Thomas has had scores of subordinates working for him during his years in government, before and after his confirmation — has confirmed that Thomas acted in the ways Hill described. And yet Democrats continue pushing revisionist histories.
Today, many Democrats demand that President Joe Biden pack the courts and destroy the judicial system, or they threaten justices on the steps of the Supreme Court.
“I want to tell you, Gorsuch! I want to tell you, Kavanaugh!” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last year. “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”
Whatever did Schumer mean? And what exactly are justices supposed to do? Take orders from back-benchers and hyperventilating pundits on how they should rule?
Kavanaugh was nominated by the duly elected president and confirmed by the duly elected Senate in the same constitutional manner that every Supreme Court justice in history has been nominated and confirmed.
Even if you believe that the president’s behavior in January was an attempt to “overthrow the U.S. government,” that has absolutely no bearing on the appointments he made in the years 2017, 2018 and 2020.
Ocasio-Cortez also pointed out that Trump was “elected via minority,” which is either another extraconstitutional demand or a sign that the congresswoman is simply unaware that presidents have never been elected by majority but rather by the Electoral College.
Out of 9 justices, 3 were appointed by a man who tried to overthrow the US government (& elected via minority).
Those 3 will decide whether the US will legalize forcing people to give birth against their will.
Legitimacy requires consent of the governed. They are dismantling it
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2021
Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that overturning Roe would necessitate “forced birth” — a new talking point among pro-abortion advocates — is both factually wrong and morally repugnant. Increasingly, progressives talk about pregnancy as if it were a gruesome affliction and unborn children as if they were malignant tumors.
Whatever the case, a world without Roe would merely allow voters to decide when and how lethal force can be used against the unborn — because the issue has nothing to do with constitutional law.
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