Democrats are in a quandary over the Supreme Court. Every four years, they've warned their voters that electing a Republican president will lead to more conservative Supreme Court justices. And yet, since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 through today, they've lost more presidential elections than they've won. Maybe the voters are telling Democrats something. Maybe Americans don't want the court packed with Sonia Sotomayors who make up or rewrite the laws as they see fit.
So now the Left is angry over the tilt of the court, which has six conservatives and three liberals.
Why? Because elections have consequences. Sorry, this is the price you pay for nominating Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. They aren't exactly hanging around anywhere near the 50-yard line on political ideology.
Now we have Democrats divided on what to do next. Many want Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Elizabeth Warren to be their next presidential nominee. There's no learning curve here.
In the meantime, while Donald Trump is still president, they want urgent action. On the one hand, the democratic socialists want to abolish the highest court of the land. What they want to replace it with is anyone's guess.
Other party leaders want to pack the court with four new liberal justices. Franklin Roosevelt tried this court-packing scheme in 1937, and voters rebelled.
But here they go again. On Sunday, Rep. James Clyburn (SC-06) raised this possibility and disgracefully played the race card when asked about the Supreme Court's recent decisions. He accused Republicans of taking "this country back ... to those rulings of Justice Taney that said, 'No Black man has any right that a white man must respect.'" He was referring to Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the infamous 1857 Dred Scott opinion just before the Civil War.
Does he even know that for 100 years after the Civil War, Democrats were the party of segregation?
What's deeply troubling about this war on the Supreme Court is that this is the institution that is the final check against runaway mob-rule democracy that can trample the rights of the minority. That minority could be blacks, Hispanics, gays, immigrants, or disabled people. They don't seem to understand that pure majority-rule democracy is, as the old saying goes, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Pure democracy only goes your way until you no longer have 50 percent plus one voters on your side. Clyburn is right that there have been occasions, like the one from 1857 that he mentioned, when the court has made egregiously wrong decisions. But mostly, the court gets it right. It's not clear how stacking the court — on the Left or the Right — could make for more just decisions.
This is why Republicans are so wrong to try to abolish the filibuster in the Senate. We always want to make it HARDER, not easier, to pass new edicts that impair our freedoms.
I, personally, would have no problem expanding the Supreme Court to 12 justices if it could be done in a fair, nonpartisan way. I also strongly support a mandatory retirement age of 75 for all future justices on the court.
But to overly politicize — or, worse, do away with — the Supreme Court and allow Congress to have the last word on the constitutionality of new laws is a dangerous proposition. James Madison once famously described the judiciary as a "bulwark" of our liberties. Hopefully, we will never give up this most important check and balance on runaway government power.
Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.