Supreme Court Shift Could Take Justices Out of High Gear

Liberals often claim their concern about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the U.S Supreme Court, and the subsequent nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, is that it could change the political balance of the Court.

Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper sees it differently. While Kavanaugh’s record generally puts him on the right, the biggest shock to the Court may be less political and more structural.

In an interview on “Wilkow!” on CRTV, Horace told host Andrew Wilkow that someone such as Kavanaugh could help return the operation of the judiciary to something more in line with the intentions of our Constitution’s authors.

Horace noted:

In America, the way our founders contemplated our system to operate is that you have to do the heavy lifting. The hard work of persuading your fellow citizen. You can’t change policy, you can’t change leaders, you can’t change law without persuading your fellow citizens.

The left says: “Whew, that’s too much trouble. Oh, it’s just too much work. Here’s what we want. Our idea. Our policy initiative. It is so right [that] what we’re gonna do is we’re just going to force it into place [through the judiciary]. And we’re going to mandate that you adopt it.”

You and I may look at a particular law that Congress has passed and we may say: “You know, I don’t really like that.” The thing about that is we have the power to influence that. We can change that.

What the left says is: “We don’t want you to have complaints. We don’t want you to be able to make changes. We want you to accept it as if it had come from God on high.” And yet there is no basis for what it is they are telling us other than it’s their policy preference. That’s unjust. That’s not self-government. And that’s not what the founders intended.

Wilkow noted how the confirmation process has become such a nasty affair. This includes opposition research and wild speculation about future rulings as well as the use of the filibuster to block nominees and the filibuster-busting “nuclear option.” Horace said this is all a perfect example of his eponymous “Cooper’s Law” in which he posits that “bad behavior begets bad behavior”:

What has happened is every bad action has resulted in an equal bad action…

Now the truth of the matter is it would be much better if we just returned back to a norm where we didn’t place so much emphasis on the Court at all.

This is the reason our founders never thought of it as the penultimate branch of government. It was supposed to stay in a certain lane. The left has pushed it – not out of its lane necessarily – but to the front of the line. Into the main lane, and put it in charge.

Change may come, Horace speculated, from the shift in behavior that moves the judiciary out of that main lane and back into its traditional role of interpreting the law rather than making it:

The truth of the matter is what we needed are simple referees… But because of bad activity, we continue to get more and more attention to this.

It’s my hope, with someone like Brett Kavanaugh put on the Court, that people will decide: “You know what? All this we’ve been doing on the Court wasn’t right – wasn’t appropriate. Let’s just go back to constitutional norms.”



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