For a sense of how bereft the Democrats are of credible leaders and sensible policy ideas all one has to do is listen to the remarks of former Vice President Kamala Harris on the Win with Black Women podcast. She proposed a “no bad ideas brainstorm” in which Democrats would discuss “What we need to do, and think about doing, around the Electoral College … expanding the Supreme Court … statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.” Harris, whom most polls of Democrat voters show as the front-runner for their party’s 2028 presidential nomination, said this as if she were offering fresh ideas. They are, in reality, shopworn tropes that can be heard every time a far left Democrat gets in front of a microphone.
The obvious reason she and other lefties sing this tired tune is the promise of four new Senate seats, all of which would presumably be filled by Democrats.
They are not merely bad ideas, they constitute a clear and present danger to the republic. Indeed, they suggest that the Democratic Party can’t be trusted with real power until it is divested of the radical leftists who now control its agenda. All of the braying about “our democracy” notwithstanding, it could hardly be more obvious that the Democrats want to eliminate the constitutional foundations of the Republic so they can establish one-party rule. This is why Harris speculates about what we “need to do” about the Electoral College. She and her fellow travelers believe that it impedes genuine democracy, but obviously don’t grasp the consequences of dumping it. As historian Allen C. Guelzo writes at National Affairs:
Abolishing the Electoral College now might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate (which, after all, represents the interests of the states), and eventually, no sense in even having states, except as administrative departments of the central government. We structure everything in our political system around a federation that divides power between states and the federal government … abolishing the Electoral College would point toward doing away with the entire federal system.
Just as Harris and her ilk don’t understand the damage that would be caused by getting rid of the Electoral College, they are completely clueless about the consequences of meddling with the Supreme Court. It’s extremely unlikely that Harris could explain what the Court contributes to the stability of the country. SCOTUS acts as an independent arbiter, protecting constitutional rights and the rule of law from temporary political pressures of the day or majoritarian overreach. The Democrats were perfectly content with the Court when it saved Obamacare, but vociferously denounced it when it overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion law to the states. They should make up their minds. Even Conor Friedersdorf, writing in the Atlantic grasps that:
After last summer’s ruling on abortion [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health], attacks on the Supreme Court were inevitable … What’s striking and harder to understand is the similarly furious backlash to the Supreme Court’s most recent term, which began in October 2022 and culminated in rulings announced this summer. That term encompasses 60 cases in total. The nonpartisan National Constitution Center flagged 13 of those cases as significant. Taken together, they show a Court that is broadly in step with public opinion and whose justices form shifting coalitions across ideological lines.
The next product of the Harris brainstorm was statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. The obvious reason she and other lefties sing this tired tune is the promise of four new Senate seats, all of which would presumably be filled by Democrats. Beginning with the District of Columbia, it’s clear that Harris and her accomplices in Congress haven’t done their homework. There is a long history of bipartisan legal opinions from the Justice Department that clearly indicate that a constitutional amendment is required to make the District of Columbia a state. The district’s peculiar history and the 23rd Amendment render the normal legislative process of granting statehood impossible. As R. Hewitt Pate writes at the Heritage Foundation:
If you had to try and find an issue on which Robert Kennedy, Pat Wald, and Ed Meese all agreed, you might be surprised to find it is the constitutionality of legislated D.C. statehood. Every Justice Department that has addressed the question, from the Kennedy Administration to the Bush Administration, has concluded that the Constitution does not allow for legislative alteration of the District’s status. Each administration has addressed different proposals and emphasized different problems, but the unanimity remains. The legality of D.C. statehood … is not a partisan issue.
Making Puerto Rico a state would not require a constitutional amendment, but admitting it to the country is also far more difficult than voting to admit a territory. Its constitution declares that it is a commonwealth independent of the United States, which seriously complicates the admission process. So, like all of the precipitation emanating from former Vice President Harris’ brainstorm, not much serious thought has gone into it. As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley writes in The Hill: “The American Constitution was a rejection of the “bad ideas” that politicians (called demagogues in Ancient Greece) have historically used to marshal the power of the mob.” And there can be little doubt that Harris and the Democrats want a “mobocracy.”
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