by Christopher Roach
It’s been a crazy few weeks. Joe Biden has finally dropped out of the presidential race. We first heard the news via tweet, using suspiciously unofficial letterheadand then he disappeared for a week. It was weird.
I don’t know where they were keeping him or what was going on, but when he showed up, his Oval Office speech was average at best, full of sentimentality and little explanation as to why exactly he was leaving, when he had said a few days earlier that he would stay. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer reportedly threatened him with removal from office under the 25th Amendmentwhich is entirely possible.
I have a feeling that Biden Kamala Harris support was revenge, a monkey wrench that was supposed to ruin everything that had been set up”quick basic“they were toying with the idea of installing whomever Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer had in mind. While they wanted to control the situation, he knew that Democrats obsessed with affirmative action could not easily coordinate against it.
Undemocratic Democratic Party
The lingering anxiety about the process is being swept away by an orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to turn Harris into the savior of the Republic. It seems that the primaries and their millions of voters don’t matter. While neither side cares all that much about voters, this is a pretty cynical, old-school “smoke-filled room” decision that ignored any public input. This is despite weeks of telling us how energetic and edged Biden is and that he simply had a “bad night” at the debate. And then he suddenly had to step aside.
The debate was nothing modern. Nothing had changed. Biden had stumbled at press conferences over the past four years, stumbling over his words and appearing lost.
When Democrats talk about Our Democracy™, the emphasis is on “Our.” That means they get the substantive results they want. Elections, the will of the people, the participation of the common man — all of that has nothing to do with it.
They are not interested in votes, mandates, or even fair and lucid electoral procedures. They are interested in winning. So, far from loving democracy, they are interested in controlling unsavory voters who do not support their plans, i.e. the bad ones.MAGA Republicans.”
Does procedure matter?
Because law is one of the basic tools of government, many people involved in politics are lawyers. In the past, lawyers were known for their respect for the law and its promise of procedural regularity and predictability. The whole point of a legal system was that it set the rules of the game, limiting who could ultimately have power. Apart from some hidden areas on the margins, until recently, this prevailed for the most part.
But about 100 years ago, legal realists arrived. And cynically they taught us that the law is not what it seems, but rather a smokescreen. What really mattered were other forces, such as economics and prejudice and “what did the judge have for breakfast.” For a time, this was a merely descriptive approach, but within a generation, the disciples of these realists became judges, professors, and activists.
Already believing that most law is ideology and propaganda, they had no respect for the law as a system and no scruples in unraveling it to advance their utopian vision. From there, they simply began enforcing their liberal prejudices and inventions paper-thin justifications simulating legal reasoning overturn precedent, sometimes stringing words together to sound high-flown, as in the neologism “substantial due process.”
Having achieved much of what they wanted, they suddenly became small-c conservatives when Reagan arrived, and their vandalism of the Constitution became unpopular. Like their concern for democracy, their newfound respect for precedent was results-oriented and selective. They don’t mean it seriously, and they never let it stop their revolution while it was underway. They simply don’t like to see the ill-gotten gains of their activist precedents facing reversal.
In defense of their revolution, they turned the tables and called the originalist lawyers who cleaned up their mess, activists. However, right-wing originalists and textualists have typically not advocated the right to impose outcomes simply because they reflect the modern “zeitgeist” or promote justice, but rather because Roe and many others from that earlier period were poorly reasoned and orthogonal to the constitutional text. Unconcerned with procedure or precedent, left-wing legal realists recognized no criterion for the excellence of jurisprudence beyond the furtherance of narrow ideological goals.
This versatility of methods and procedures is now evident everywhere you look. The Democratic Party removed a president who won the primary campaign and installed a replacement candidate, thereby invalidating the votes of millions of primary voters.
The Party That Spent the 60s defense of freedom of speech—and even now it makes a huge impression a show of completely justified book bans—I want to hire government agents to censor us in the name of fighting hate and disinformation. They see nothing wrong with working closely with technology monopolies to achieve results.
In the Trump era, Congress has scrutinized any form of presidential recognition, classifying a conversation with a foreign leader about the Biden family’s corruption in Ukraine as impeachable, though Biden has never faced similar scrutiny because of his role as the epicenter of the family’s sprawling influence-peddling operation that has spanned from his time as vice president to the present.
Some of the left’s biggest recent defeats have been on the Supreme Court, where Trump has appointed three justices. Gun rights have moved forward, and abortion rights (a judicial creation) have fallen by the wayside. Democrats have responded, naturally, not with whining, or intellectual arguments, or pleading with voters to vote for change, but instead encouraging the filling of the court.
No one on the right has proposed to supplement the composition of the court in response to Roe Or Obergefell, or after a series of decisions expanding protections for criminal procedures during the Warren era, or even during various cases that hampered the prosecution of the war on terror during the Bush administration. Instead, the right responded with intellectual argumentation and deference to the courts. They emphasized the need to counter intellectual pretensions of the legal community and the need to win more elections.
Don’t listen to the false advice of hypocrites
In other words, the right has a philosophy of government that includes not only substantive goals but also certain views about constitutional structure. This philosophy addresses the basic contours of government and the responsibilities of the branches of government, as well as the division of labor between federal and state governments. In this respect, their beliefs largely mirror what is taught in middle school civics classes: legislatures make laws, courts interpret them, and the presidency enforces them.
The Left, by contrast, is completely indifferent to these questions. It does not favor, in isolation, a muscular or minimalist judiciary, a sturdy or a pliant executive, or legislative supremacy as opposed to subordination. A branch of government can be promoted or weakened solely by policy outcomes.
That’s one reason the left favors constitutionally dubious administrative agencies—with their own regulations and the authority to search regulated entities without a warrant. These agencies are typically staffed by true believers and dedicated to using government power to advance various leftist goals: environmental regulation, social engineering, gun control, workplace interference under the guise of anti-discrimination policies, and the like. Of course, they are not ecstatic about eliminating one of the foundations of that system, Chevron compliance with the regulations of administrative bodies.
The installation of Kamala Harris by a committee of donors and party bigwigs is patently anti-democratic, elitist, and rude to voters. You would think there might be a little more shame and embarrassment in this turn of events, given years of paeans to Our Democracy™. But now it’s accomplished fact, and faith in the results is common even among the lowest-ranking party activists.
Biden came to power in both the 2020 primaries and the general election in questionable fashion. Not surprisingly, his presidency has been true to its beginnings, riddled with intrigue, lies, and propaganda designed to cover up his weaknesses and unpopularity. We can expect Harris to govern in a similar manner if she wins. That is, a Harris administration would likely be secretive, lawless, and indifferent to the consent of the governed, revealing the stain of the undemocratic original sin that tarnished her coronation.
In other words, Harris is the perfect avatar of the hostile Deep State and its numerous stakeholders.
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Christopher Roach is an associate fellow at the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice in Florida. He is a dual graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously published in The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views expressed are his own.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Joe Biden.
