The Dems' War on SCOTUS

The Democrats are threatening a campaign of "massive resistance" against the Supreme Court.

Comes news from the Windy City that in response to the resounding victory for Second Amendment Rights in McDonald v. Chicago the Mayor and City Counsel have turned to the city’s problems in a manner designed to protect constitutional liberties.  Just kidding.  They have instituted a scheme of “massive resistance.”

Mayor Daley has said he will not “roll over” to the Supreme Court.  Now, I’m as much for not treating Supreme Court pronouncements as gospel as the next guy (presuming he has an “Impeach Warren” bumper sticker down in the basement), but this is really a scandal.    This is not a made-up right we have come to expect from the Court. Yet Chicago, the President’s home town, has in four days set out to resist, resist, resist the clear import of the Court’s decision.  President Obama has said nothing.

In the same vein, when the Supreme Court, logically determined that a law that prohibits speech about elections before an election and states how much a person can spend on such speech is not in accord with the First Amendment’s command that Congress “shall make no law”  prohibiting speech, the Democrats went berserk.  Did they quote: “I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”  Nope.  George Will lays out a bit of what they did here.      Worse, the Democrats and the President have used the Court’s decision to attack the Court in terms that explicitly state that they want to curtail speech by interests they do not like.  The President sent Elena Kagan to tell the Court that the campaign finance laws gave the government the right to ban books.  The Supremes gave her a hard time.  In his State of the Union address President Obama chastised them for this.  Al Franken specifically attacked the decision because he did not like the speech he thought would be allowed.

The Democratic Party just lost its last elected supporter of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education in Robert Byrd.  But a whole army of Democrats are now emerging to oppose, in the most vitriolic terms, civil rights victories won by litigants before the Supreme Court.  They stand with the government and against the individual in the personal decision to own a gun, specifically identified by the Founders as an individual right.  They stand with the government and against the individual in the choice of how much money to spend and when to oppose or support a candidate or ballot measure.  They are all for free speech; they will just deny you the ability to buy television advertising, put up billboards or distribute leaflets.

It is a measure of the left’s control of our society that this swift, acidic and unanimous opposition to civil rights by the Democrats is hardly commented upon and linked to their previous attacks on civil rights.  Andrew Jackson (Democrat) ordered the Cherokee west despite a Supreme Court order enforcing their property rights.  Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) locked up socialists who opposed his war policies.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat) interred citizens of Japanese descent living on the West Coast.  All but two of the signers of the Southern Manifesto were Democrats.

Now we have Supreme Court decisions affirming and reviving ancient rights, codified in the First and Second Amendments of the Bill of Rights.  The Democratic Party has made it its business to nullify these rulings, harass those exercising such rights and demonize those publishing material or supporting candidates the Democrats do not agree with.  At the same time they laud and promote “rights” no founder ever mentioned, no soldier ever fought for, no American ever voted on.  This is a party that has gone off the rails.