by Christopher Roach
It’s been a crazy few weeks. Joe Biden finally quit the presidential race. We heard it first through a tweet using a suspiciously unofficial letterhead, and then he disappeared for a week. It was weird.
I don’t know where they had him or what was going on, but when he appeared, his Oval Office speech was mediocre at best, full of sentimentality and short on explanations for why exactly he was quitting after saying just a few days earlier he would stay. Word is Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer threatened him with removal under the 25th Amendment, which is eminently plausible.
I have the feeling that Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was revenge, a monkey wrench to mess up the rigged “blitz primary” being toyed with to install whoever Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer had in mind. As much as they wanted to control things, he knew the affirmative-action-obsessed Democrats could not easily coordinate against her.
The Undemocratic Democratic Party
Lingering unease with this process is being swept away by the organized propaganda campaign to transform Harris into the savior of the republic. It appears primaries and their millions of voters don’t matter. While neither party cares that much for voters, this is pretty cynical, an old-school “smoke-filled room” decision that included no public input. This is happening even though for weeks they told us how vigorous and sharp Biden was and that he merely had a “bad night” at the debate. Then suddenly, he had to step aside.
The debate was nothing new. Nothing changed. Biden has given stumbling press conferences, tripped over his words, and looked lost frequently over the last four years.
When the Democrats talk about Our Democracy™, the emphasis is on “Our.” It means they get the substantive results they want. Elections, the will of the people, participation by the common man—all of that has nothing to do with it.
They don’t care about votes, about a mandate, or even about fair and transparent election procedures. They are about winning. Thus, far from loving democracy, they’re about controlling the unsavory voters who don’t endorse their plans, i.e., the evil “MAGA Republicans.”
Does Procedure Matter?
Since law is one of the primary tools of government, many of the people invested in politics tend to be lawyers. Once upon a time, lawyers were notable for their reverence of the law and its promise of procedural regularity and predictability. The whole point of the legal system was that it set up the rules of the game, limiting whoever may eventually have power. Beyond some murky areas on the margins, this mostly prevailed until recently.
But about 100 years ago, the legal realists arrived. And they taught us cynically that law is not what it appears to be but rather a smokescreen. What really mattered were other forces like economics and prejudice and “what the judge had for breakfast.” For a while, this remained only a descriptive approach, but within a generation, the students of these realists became judges, professors, and activists.
Already believing much of the law to be so much ideology and propaganda, they had no respect for the law as a system and little compunction about unraveling it to further their utopian vision. From there, they just started pushing their liberal prejudices and inventing paper-thin justifications simulating legal reasoning to undo precedent, sometimes mashing words together to sound highfalutin’, as in the neologism “substantive due process.”
Having accomplished much of what they wanted, they suddenly became “small c” conservatives when Reagan arrived and their vandalism to the Constitution became unpopular. Like their concern for democracy, their newfound respect for precedent was results-oriented and selective. They don’t mean it and they never let it stop their revolution when it was underway. They simply don’t like it when the ill-gotten gains from their activist precedents face reversal.
Defending their revolution, they turned around the charge and labeled originalist jurists cleaning up their mess as activists. But right-leaning originalists and textualists did not typically proclaim a right to impose results simply because they reflect the new “spirit of the times” or further justice, but rather because Roe and much else from this earlier period were poorly reasoned and orthogonal to the constitutional text. Caring little for procedure or precedent, leftist legal realists admitted no criterion of jurisprudential excellence beyond the furtherance of narrow ideological ends.
This versatility about methods and procedures is now apparent everywhere one looks. The party of democracy removed the president, who won a primary campaign, and installed a replacement candidate, nullifying the votes of millions of primary voters in the process.
The party that spent the 1960s defending free speech—and even now makes a big show of completely justified book bans—wants to employ government agents to censor us in the name of combating hate and disinformation. They think nothing of working hand-in-glove with tech monopolies to achieve results.
During the Trump years, Congress policed every exercise of presidential discretion, classifying a conversation with a foreign leader over the Biden family’s corruption in Ukraine as impeachable, even though Biden has faced no similar scrutiny for his role as the epicenter of an extensive family influence peddling operation that stretched from his time as vice president until today.
Some of the biggest recent losses to the left came from the Supreme Court, where Trump appointed three justices. Gun rights advanced and abortion rights (a judicial creation) went by the wayside. The Democrats naturally responded not with grumbling or intellectual argument, nor by imploring voters to vote for change, but instead by encouraging the packing of the court.
No one on the right proposed court-packing in response to Roe or Obergefell, or after the string of decisions expanding criminal procedural protections in the Warren era, or even during the various cases that stymied the prosecution of the war on terror during the Bush administration. Instead, the right responded with intellectual argument and respect for the courts. They emphasized the need to counteract the intellectual pretensions of the legal academe and the need to win more elections.
Don’t Listen to the False Counsel of Hypocrites
In other words, the right has a philosophy of government that includes not only substantive ends but also certain views on constitutional structure. This philosophy addresses the basic contours of government and the responsibilities of the constituent branches, as well as the division of labor between federal and state governments. In this respect, their beliefs largely track what one learns in junior high civics, i.e., legislatures write laws, courts interpret them, and the presidency enforces them.
The left, by contrast, is completely indifferent to these questions. It does not favor, in the abstract, a muscular or minimalist judiciary, a strong or deferential executive, or legislative supremacy versus subordination. A branch of government can be promoted or diminished solely because of the policy outcome.
This is one reason the left favors constitutionally suspect administrative agencies—complete with the regulations they author and the power to search regulated entities without warrants. These agencies tend to be staffed with true believers and oriented towards the use of government power to further the various ends of the left: environmental regulation, social engineering, gun control, interference with the workplace under the aegis of anti-discrimination policy, and the like. They are, of course, not happy about the removal of one of this system’s foundations, Chevron deference to administrative agency regulations.
The installation of Kamala Harris by a committee of donors and party big shots is obviously anti-democratic, elitist, and disrespectful to voters. One would think there might be a little more shame and sheepishness about this turn of events considering the years of paeans to Our Democracy™. But it’s now a fait accompli, and the belief in results is shared even among the lowest-level party activists.
Biden came to power in both the 2020 primary and general election by dubious means. Unsurprisingly, his presidency matched its origins and has been steeped in intrigue, lies, and propaganda to conceal his weaknesses and unpopularity. We can expect Harris to govern in much the same way, should she win. That is, a Harris administration would likely be secretive, lawless, and indifferent to the consent of the governed, manifesting the stain of undemocratic original sin polluting her coronation.
In other words, Harris is a perfect avatar for the hostile Deep State and its many stakeholders.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Joe Biden.
