Democrats don’t fear Brett Kavanaugh, they fear the Constitution

Sure, some of the anger aimed Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is partisan bluster meant to placate the activist base. Still, most Democrats were going to get hysterical about any pick, because any conservative pick was going to take the Constitution far too literally for their liking. For those who rely on the administrative state and coercion as a policy tool — forcing people to join political organizations, forcing them to support abortion, forcing them to subsidize socially progressive sacraments, forcing them to create products that undermine their faith, and so on — that’s a big problem.

Some, like former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, indulged in the histrionic rhetoric we’ve come to expect in the Trump era, claiming that Kavanaugh would “threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come.” But almost none of the objections coming from leading Democrats were, even ostensibly, about Kavanaugh’s qualifications as a jurist or, for that matter, with his interpretation of the Constitution.

“Specifically,” prospective presidential candidate Kamala Harris argues, “as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy, his nomination presents an existential threat to the health care of hundreds of millions of Americans.” Surely the former attorney general of California comprehends that “health care” is not a constitutional right, but rather a policy concern whose contours are still being debated by lawmakers, and probably will be for decades…

Normalizing the idea that the Constitution should be subservient to the fleeting will of politics or progressive conceptions of “justice” goes back to Barack Obama, who in 2008 promised to nominate justices who shared “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” The Left hailed this position as proof of a thoughtful and moral temperament, when in reality it’s an ideological position that allows judges to arbitrarily create law and subordinate their constitutional duty to their personal worldview.

Of course there are a number of legitimate debates about how we should interpret the Constitution. Of course all justices aren’t political on all issues, nor are all conservatives pure. But it’s the Left that now embraces relativistic arguments about the intent and purpose of the Constitution.