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Saturday, October 6, 2018

Mr. Justice Kavanaugh

I watched the Senate vote on the Kavanaugh nomination just now.  You surely know, by now, that Kavanaugh was confirmed by 50 to 48.  It was a wonderful moment.  In many ways it replicated the evening of election day in 2016 when the Trump/Republican victory changed the course of the USA.

Think about it.  With Kavanaugh on SCOTUS, the left is clearly in the minority, a situation that is likely to continue for a long, long time.  For the last seventy years, we have seen the left use the Court to do things that they could not accomplish with elections.  Rather than convincing their fellow citizens of the validity of their positions, the left just got unelected judges to impose those positions without any vote.  Items that seemed to have no reference in the Constitution got imposed by left wing judges who spoke of "emanations from the penumbra" of certain amendments.  Amazing!  The penumbra is just a shadow, and we had justices talking about concepts that leaked out of those shadows being required, REQUIRED, of all Americans.

For decades, as SCOTUS imposed these new supposed constitutional requirements, there was at least rational debate about the merits of these requirements.  In the last ten years, however, the Democrats gave up on debate.  They knew that they could not win at the ballot box, so they put more and more reliance on SCOTUS.  And today, that whole battle plan of the Democrats came crashing down.  It has been totally destroyed.

Just imagine where we are.  The words of the Constitution are now going to be interpreted as having the meaning that they had when they were written.  This may sound like common sense, but for the Supreme Court, it's an earth-shaking concept. 

Another doctrine that will come back to life in a big way is that the Court will no longer substitute its own views for those of Congress or the President.  If the President has been given the power by Congress or the Constitution to determine how the government will act on a particular issue, the Court will not normally interfere with the actions the President takes.  In other words, the days in which liberal judges can interfere with or stop President Trump from determining immigration and border policies are drawing quickly to an end.  A decision such as whether or not carbon dioxide is a pollutant will be made not by the courts but by Congress or the EPA.  Those are just examples; the total change will be profound and continuing.  America has moved much closer to being a democracy again.

And here's the kicker:  the next four justices most likely to leave the Court are Ginsburg, Breyer, Thomas and Sotomayor.  They all could go during this or the next term for President Trump.  If even two of them retire and Trump names replacements of the sort like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, there will be a conservative, pro-Constitution majority on the Court for the next 25 years.  That means that the Democrats' use of SCOTUS to get around their inability to convince the voters of the merits of their positions will be over.

It's a great day for America.

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