The Myth of the Impartial Democratic Judge

Shortly after several Democratic Senators including Kamala Harris and Dick Durbin, suggested that the confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh should not take place until after the release of a whole bunch of documents related to his time in the George W. Bush administration, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who I will not vote for, went on a lengthy tirade against a series of Supreme Court decisions made by the “Roberts five,” which he defined as “all five Republican appointees” currently sitting on the Supreme Court. The “Roberts five” currently consists of Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, George W. Bush appointees Samuel Alito and John Roberts, George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas, and Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy.  Although technically speaking, the “Roberts five” shrinked to the “Roberts four” following the retirement of Justice Kennedy, whom Kavanaugh will replace upon confirmation.  Hence, liberals have a desire to stall Kavanaugh’s confirmation for as long as possible to prevent the reincarnation of the “Roberts five.”   

At one point, he accused the “Roberts five” of imposing a “far right” social agenda, specifically citing the 2007 Supreme Court decision Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban.  Without the Supreme Court, the Democrats would have never had the ability to impose their “far left” social agenda on the country.  The 1973 decision Roe v. Wade overturned abortion bans in 47 of the 50 states.  Seven of nine justices effectively ended public debate on the issue of abortion, which strongly divides the country.  Yet idiots like Gloria Steinem still describe abortion as “the basis of democracy.”  “The basis of democracy?” No.  The basis of third-wave feminism and the left’s opposition to Kavanaugh? Absolutely.  If anything, Roe v. Wade provides a perfect example of how a democracy should not work.  Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with that when she said, “heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved conflict.”  

42 years later, the implementation of the left’s “far left” social agenda continued with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision discovering a “right” to same-sex marriage, which came just two years after the Supreme Court struck down the Bill Clinton-signed Defense of Marriage Act.  The Defense of Marriage Act prohibited Federal recognition of same-sex marriages, it did not explicitly prevent states from legalizing same-sex marriage. A decade after the signing of “DOMA,” both houses of Congress ended up voting on some version of a “Federal Marriage Amendment,” which would have written a ban on same-sex marriage into the Constitution.  The most recent votes on the Federal Marriage Amendment took place after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.  The Federal Marriage Amendment ended up failing in both houses of  Congress despite the fact that Republicans held the majorities in each chamber and many Democrats at the time claimed to oppose same-sex marriage. 

Following the legalization of same-sex marriage in  Massachusetts, many states began holding referendums on Constitutional amendments; which voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of.  Referendums on same-sex marriage continued after the failure to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment.  The number of states recognizing same-sex marriage began to increase as state legislatures in socially liberal states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Illinois, and Rhode Island began legalizing same-sex marriage while state Supreme Courts struck down state statutes banning same-sex marriage, claiming they violated the individual state Constitutions.  In 2012, voters in a total of four states either rejected Constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage or supported referendums legalizing same-sex marriage.  Dissatistifed with the results of democracy, advocates of same-sex marriage began making the argument that bans on same-sex marriage violated the United States Constitution.    

Many of the Republican talking heads who have spent the past twenty months trashing the Trump administration signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down DOMA, which led to several lower courts striking down state statutes and Constitutional Amendments banning same-sex marriage, passed by the voters, unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court had hoped that the lower courts would do their dirty work for them and eventually declare same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional in all fifty states.  Their plan had worked out marvelously until the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee did not violate the United States Constitution; the lone appellate court to rule that way.  The plaintiff in the case, whose significant other had already died, appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where he received a victory thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee, voting with all of the liberal justices.  It looks like the “Roberts five” hasn’t managed to put a stranglehold on the progressive agenda after all.   

 

The left could not have achieved their two biggest victories in the culture war, legalized abortion in all fifty states and mandated same-sex marriage in all fifty states, without the Courts.  That alone explains why they have pulled out all the stops in order to derail the Kavanaugh nomination.  They can talk about avenging Merrick Garland all they want but everyone knows that they would have treated Kavanaugh this way regardless of whether or not Republicans had decided to abandon their long-standing political strategy of “being gracious” by declining to hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee that he made with less than a year to go in his lame duck Presidency.  At one point during his speech, Whitehouse quoted longtime New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who said “the Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.” If Greenhouse had any intellectual honesty at all, she would have made the exact same statement had Merrick Garland ended up on the Supreme Court, simply replacing the word “Republican” with “Democratic.”   

CNN’s Chris Cuomo weighed in on the “myth of the impartial judge” while castigating Brett Kavanaugh, saying “The idea that Supreme Court justices or any judges for that matter are somehow free of political leaning, come on. They’re not computers. They’re people. Their humanity is a virtue, but it’s also something that requires curiosity.” Surely, Cuomo would have made the exact same statement if a Democratic Supreme Court nominee had claimed objectivity during their confirmation hearing.  Don’t bet on it.  If only Cuomo would say on air “The idea that journalists are somehow free of political leaning, come on.” He and his fellow comrades in the mainstream media consistently tout their objectivity to the American people while doing everything in their power to serve as the PR firm for the Democratic Party.  

So now that we’ve established the fact that judges do in fact have inherent biases, can’t Whitehouse admit the laughability of his implication that Republican-appointed judges make their decisions based on the wishes of powerful special interest groups while Democratic-appointed judges make their decisions based on the best interests of the American people? For an example of how liberal judges serve as puppets for left-wing special interest groups, look no further than Judge William Orrick, a San Francisco-based Federal Judge who put a gag order on the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress that prevented them from releasing undercover videos conversations with Planned Parenthood officials. The release of these conversations might harm the left’s mission to preserve their “far left social agenda,” which includes half a million dollars in taxpayer funding for the nation’s largest abortion provider.  The undercover videos would not have reflected well on Planned Parenthood, The Center for Medical Progress asked for an appeals court to remove Orrick from the case because he “helped open, run, and fund a Planned Parenthood clinic” in a “family resource center” where he served in a “leadership role.”

Throughout the confirmation hearings, the Democrats expressed concern about Kavanaugh’s presence on the Supreme Court in the wake of the never-ending investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election; which has sense devolved into an extensive, taxpayer-funded opposition research campaign that the Democrats did not have time to finish before the election.  New Jersey Senator and aspiring actor/Presidential candidate Cory Booker asked “Why not just announce right now that you will recuse yourself from any matters coming before the Mueller investigation?”  The Democrats fear that Kavanaugh’s presence on the high court would give President Trump a fifth Justice who would vote in his favor should any legal battles tied to the Mueller probe make it all the way to the Supreme Court.





Perhaps they forgot that Supreme Court Justices have not hesitated to rule against the Presidents who appointed them. At the time of United States v. Nixon, President Nixon had appointed four of the nine Supreme Court Justices; three of the four Justices he appointed ordered him to release tapes related to the Watergate investigation, in addition to the five remaining justices.  The fourth Justice, William Rehnquist, recused himself because he had actually worked in the Nixon administration, unlike Kavanaugh, who has never worked in the Trump administration.

Should Kavanaugh fail to meet the Democrats’ demands to recuse himself from any case involving litigation related to President Trump and the Special Counsel investigation, he would find himself in good company with other justices who have failed to recuse themselves when a very strong argument exists that they should have. In recent history, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan did not recuse themselves from the Obergefell v. Hodges case, despite the fact that they had performed same-sex weddings.  During her confirmation hearings, Ruth Bader Ginsburg set a precedent where Supreme Court nominees would not indicate on hypothetical cases that may come before them during their time on the Supreme Court.  In spite of the so-called “Ginsburg rule” assuming that Supreme Court justices walk into each and every case with an open mind, the American people should not have had any trouble predicting how Ginsburg and Kagan would vote when it came to Obergefell.   

For that reason alone, the Democrats did not want Ginsburg or Kagan to recuse themselves from Obergefell because they knew that they would vote they way they wanted them to.  So the Democrats can lecture us all they want about how the “Roberts five” go off on “partisan excursions through the civil law” but keep in mind that whenever a case related to a polarizing social issue comes before Democratic-appointed judges, they vote the way the Democrats want them to, regardless of the Constitution; “Every. Damned. Time.”