“The Senate is fully within its power to let the Supreme Court literally die out.”
Cato Institute, October 26, 2016
The United States of America has had an incredible run. Our American experiment has performed admirably well in the past 200 plus years. We have been tested by outside forces and we have tested ourselves, and somehow we have endured and survived every challenge even while countless other nation’s governments have come and gone.
We owe our exceptional resilience to the checks and balances of our three branches of government, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial. I know everyone knows this. Everyone learned it early on in Civics class. This delicate balance of power is what keeps us strong and what keeps us free.
In our Constitution, Article I created the Legislative Branch, Congress. Article II created the Executive Branch, the President. And Article III created the Judicial Branch. It begins, “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court…” The Constitution of the United States of America created the Supreme Court. It is no less a part of our Nation than Congress or the President.
As I last wrote, there is a strong, unrelenting effort to eliminate the judiciary. Without judges, there would be no check on whatever the legislative and executive branches want to do, and want to do to us. Currently, we see this effort to eliminate the judiciary played out against the highest Court in our land, the United States Supreme Court.
Just a few days ago, Mr. Ilya Shapiro, a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute opined that the Senate could let the Supreme Court die out. He contends that the Senate has no duty to confirm any Supreme Court Justices so they could just let it literally die out as each of them, over time, dies in office.
If Mr. Shapiro were a lone crackpot, his peculiar position would garner no attention, but he is a Senior Fellow with the Cato Institute, a significant right wing think tank which gives thoughts to right wing politicians. Further, while he has most clearly articulated this view, he is not alone in his dangerous sentiment.
John McCain expressed that he would block any nominee that the future President Clinton would name during her tenure, whether that is four or eight years. McCain is hoping that Justice Ginsberg and Justice Breyer die sometime during that stretch. Ted Cruz advocates for blocking Supreme Court nominees indefinitely. Charles Grassley said that confirmation hearings would be a waste of time.
The brazenness of this position astounds me. These people are working to destroy one of the three branches of our government. These people are quite literally willing to kill the United States of America.
It also doesn’t escape my attention that men with names like Ilya, Boris and Vladimir are very intentionally undermining the U.S. They would see our great accomplishments relegated to the dust bin of history. And one of our best accomplishments is the establishment of a judiciary which exists outside the sway of the other branches of government.
If the Justices are no more, if Judges are no more, our democracy will very quickly fall. As Dick the Butcher’s expressed in Shakespear’s Henry the VI, if you want to take over the government, if you want to become your own law, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” You can’t take over a government and run it your own way if lawyers are in the way. The same applies to judges.
So whose interest does it serve to destroy the United States government? Who benefits from a deceased judiciary? Is this a fatal trifecta of political ego, business greed and foreign intervention? That is proving to be quite the recipe for disaster.
Killing the judiciary is anti-American. You can’t be a patriot and opposed to the judiciary at the same time. The politicians and their supporters who promote this position prove that point. The politicians who promote that position don’t need to hold any positions of power within the government they seek to destroy.
Vote them out.