Threats Over Appointing Ginsburg Replacement Latest Acts of Long-Running Insurrection

People pay their respects to Ruth Bader Ginsburg outside of the New York State Civil Supreme Court building in New York on Sept. 19, 2020. (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Since the student riots of the late 1960s, the left has been waging war on America and her political, educational, and cultural institutions. They fought against American foreign policy and the law-and-order domestic policies of Richard Nixon in the bloody streets of Chicago in 1968, and continued the fight via the insurgent presidential campaign of George McGovern in 1972, which announced the Baby Boomers’ seizure of the Democrat Party.

Leveraging the Watergate burglary via trial by media, they forced Nixon and his landslide 49-state, 520-17 Electoral College win into exile over, what in retrospect, was merely standard dirty tricks, tame both by historical and contemporary standards.

When voters ejected Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, after one failed term, the Democrats swore revenge on Ronald Reagan, but were crushed in 1984 by an even more devastating 525-13 wipeout; they also had to suffer the indignity of watching George H.W. Bush run for and win “Reagan’s third term” in 1988.

By the time Bill Clinton challenged and defeated the hapless Bush in 1992, they were desperate for a win. More important, they were desperate for the policy prescriptions—anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-American; in short, Critical Theory—that had been animating them for a quarter of a century and more. The Democrats and the GOP ping-ponged the presidency for 12 years, pushing the boundaries of acceptable discourse steadily leftward…

And then came 2016. No one could believe it, least of all the Democrat-Media Complex, which hadn’t seen 12 to 16 years of uninterrupted power since Franklin D. Roosevelt. After eight years of Barack Obama, the prospect of a term or two of Hillary Clinton might have cemented the left’s utter dominance, and the long march through the institutions would have come to a triumphant conclusion.

‘Existential Battle’

The dictionary defines insurrection as “A rising or rebellion of citizens against their government, usually manifested by acts of violence.” Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates congressional powers, among them: “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

Further, 18 U.S. Code § 2383 reads: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

If that doesn’t describe what has been going on since the “resistance” was declared against Donald Trump the night he won the election, it’s hard to imagine what might. From its first plaintive cries, the “resistance” has gradually morphed from legislative obstructionism to FBI and intelligence community malfeasance, to a sham impeachment, to the wilding street violence of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements.

In retrospect, this was inevitable. Monumentally frustrated by its so-near-yet-so-far loss in 2016, the left has been driven literally out of its mind by its unexpected defeat and string of subsequent policy losses at the hands of the hated Trump. The recent death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to have pushed the few remaining sane souls over the edge, with Twitter now rife with videos of young women screaming with rage into their cell phone cameras.

Writer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin also took to the internet to advocate a full-frontal assault on the GOP and, worse, the Constitution: “Dems aren’t powerless. They can: 1. Abolish filibuster. 2. Statehood for DC, PR. 3. Increase # of federal judges. 4. Add 3 Justices to #SCOTUS.” In his column in the New Yorker, Toobin quoted a Democrat strategist: “No one thinks that another four years of Trump is survivable. The campaign believes this is an existential battle.”

Don’t think he’s joking about D.C. statehood. Even though D.C. was explicitly established as an independent federal district politically outside the USA proper, Democrats have been pushing for D.C. self-governance for decades:

“Though a capital city, it is ironic that residents of Washington lack full self-governance. Representation in Congress is limited to a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives and a shadow senator,“ reads the District’s website. ”In 1964, Washingtonians were first allowed to vote in Presidential elections; the city was allowed to elect its own mayor only in 1973.”

As for the filibuster, former senate majority leader Harry Reid essentially abolished that in 2013 when the Democrats employed the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate the two-third super-majority rule on executive branch nominations and federal judicial nominations. Taking advantage of this loophole, current majority leader Mitch McConnell extended the option to include Supreme Court nominees.

“You’ll regret this,” McConnell warned his friends across the aisle in 2013. “A lot sooner than you think.”

‘Ruthless’

In any case, existential threats require force “by any means necessary” to repel them. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate minority leader, and firebrand House back-bencher Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have both called on Republicans to delay any action on Ginsburg’s replacement.

“We need to make sure we mobilize on an unprecedented scale to ensure this vacancy is reserved for the next president,” said AOC.

Added Schumer: “to try to and decide this at this late moment is despicable and wrong and against democracy.”

This is unconstitutional balderdash. As even the sainted RBG herself noted in a 2016 interview with the Times, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being the president in his last year.”

Power politics is not only kosher, it’s mandatory in an existential fight. “We must now be RUTHLESS,” read a banner in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park in a vigil for Justice Ginsburg. Reza Aslan, a Tehran-born Sufi Muslim turned American television personality, was even harsher: “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire [expletive] thing down.”

Can anyone imagine the Democrats forbearing to delay a Court nomination because the Republicans rolled over on their belly and begged pretty please? It is to laugh.

Attack on the Constitution

Connecticut’s mountebank Senator Richard “Sgt. Toys for Tots” Blumenthal, a lawyer and former state attorney general who lied about his Marine Corps Reserve military record by implying he had served in Vietnam, issued this ominous threat: “If Republicans recklessly & reprehensibly force a SCOTUS vote before the election—nothing is off the table.”

Now, what did Blumenthal mean by that?

Noted the New York Times in debunking Blumenthal’s claim of stolen valor in Vietnam: “He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records… In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam.”

Until recently, no one in either party would have suggested that the president not immediately fill a Supreme Court vacancy—indeed, both the late Justice Ginsburg and Hillary Clinton herself said so during the GOP’s hesitation to confirm Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia just months before a 2016 election in which a) the White House and the Senate were controlled by different parties and, b) no incumbent was running. Things are different today.

For one thing, the Democrats have threatened to pack the court a la FDR should Mitch McConnell bring Trump’s nomination to a floor vote.

As congressman, Jerry Nadler, tweeted: “If Sen. McConnell and @SenateGOP were to force through a nominee during the lame duck session—before a new Senate and President can take office—then the incoming Senate should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court.” So what? A nominee put to a floor vote before Jan. 3, when the newly elected Congress is seated, is fully legitimate. Elections, as the saying goes, have consequences.

But, as the legendary Tammany Hall fixer, George Washington Plunkitt, once famously opined, “What’s the Constitution among friends?”

As part of its multi-pronged attack on American republican democracy, the Left is now mounting major offensives against the Electoral College, with the blatantly unconstitutional National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress… shall enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State” reads Article I of the Constitution. Yet this “compact” would allow the residents of California, Illinois, and New York to elect the president in perpetuity.

It’s also called into question the legitimacy of the Senate itself (50 states, two senators apiece, no matter how large or small) as “undemocratic.” And so the insurrection continues.

Consequences

Finally, however, there are consequences:

• After a string of riots and arson attacks in Seattle, Portland, Ore., and New York City, the Justice Department has classified the cities as “anarchist jurisdictions” and moved to cut off federal funding to the municipalities. At least six people have been arrested for arson in Oregon.
• Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber signaled his impeccable virtue by declaring earlier this month that the Ivy League university had engaged in systemic racism. “We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world, and we must also ask how to address it within our own community…. Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton.” The federal Department of Education promptly launched an investigation to see whether Princeton has violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
• Perhaps in reaction, the BLM website apparently has scrubbed at least one aspect of its neo-Marxist platform: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children…”
• And the New York Times, the publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning but fundamentally bogus “1619 Project,” which sought to reframe the arrival in Virginia of some sub-Saharan African slaves (actually, indentured servants, much like the Irish and others at the time in the Western Hemisphere) aboard a Portuguese ship as the “very center of [the U.S.] national narrative,” has now memory-holed any such ahistorical claims. “The 1619 project… aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” wrote the Times at the time.
• Now, its lead writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has backed away in the face of withering historical criticism: “When I first pitched this project, my editor asked me what was my ultimate goal. I told her I wanted Americans to know the date 1619, to force that foundational date into the national lexicon. The extent to which the project continues to be attacked shows the success of the goal.” Right. She has now taken a break from Twitter.

Still, the danger to the republic persists. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past four years, it’s that the radical Democrats never stop, never sleep, and never quit. From simply calling into question the results of the 2016 election, they’ve moved smartly to attacking the Constitution itself, especially the Electoral College and the philosophy behind the Senate, and unleashing their violent thugs for emphasis. This is the very definition of insurrection.

The old saying on the left used to be, “the highest form of patriotism is dissent.” Indeed, there is even such a magazine of the same name, Dissent, a love child of the 1950s and ’60s, currently edited by Michael Kazin and Timothy Shenk.

Today, the highest form of patriotism is treason. And it needs to be dealt with, by any means necessary, as the left likes to say.

These are tough words. For almost all our history, with the exception of the Civil War, Americans have believed that, beneath our political differences, we’re all real Americans, devoted to the primacy of our Constitution and of our Bill of Rights, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press, freedom of faith and the free exercise therefore—regardless of the CCP virus or Chinese Community Party virus—and of peaceable assembly to redress grievances.

But as the insurrection rages—on the streets, in the media, in the halls of Congress—is that still true? And if not—what do we do about it? In less than two months, the choice is ours.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, will be published in December by St. Martin’s Press.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.