One of the many angry eruptions of the petulant press over Donald Trump is "he's destroying all our political norms." Trump is surely a disruptor of politics as usual — and more of a disruptor of the federal bureaucracy in his second term.
But the Democrats have been at war with long-standing political norms for a while now. Consider Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's move in 2013 to lower the vote threshold for confirming executive branch and federal judicial nominees (except for the Supreme Court) from 60 to a simple majority.
In the Trump era, the leftist lust to overturn all the norms to maximize their power has been growing every year. Trump's reelection is always treated as the End of Democracy when it was obviously democracy's continuation. Arrogant Democrats think democracy only functions when they win.
Look no further than 2024 loser Kamala Harris calling for wrecking a stack of norms in an "Emergency Call" on May 13 with the group Win With Black Women. Kamala denounced the Supreme Court as "backdooring racism" by ruling against using race in redistricting.
She called for a "No Bad Idea Brainstorm," but the ideas that followed were all in that Harry Reid spirit of grabbing all the power for the Left, that the only norm that matters is acquiring as much power as possible, and calling it "democracy."
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So that would include:
- Abolishing the Electoral College, since no one should care about small-population red states.
- "Supreme Court reform," or expanding the court from nine justices to 13, so they can install four leftists right away. If this were accomplished, perhaps Hakeem Jeffries would stop calling the Supreme Court "illegitimate."
- Multi-member legislative districts, being pushed by leftist groups like the Brennan Center for Justice.
- Rules to "penalize" potential Supreme Court justices for "lying" to the Senate Judiciary Committee about how they would vote. They would like to extract a promise to support abortion, for example. This ruins the notion that judges shouldn't have to make campaign promises to get confirmed.
- Statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, on the assumption that this adds more Democrats to the House and Senate. She said, "We've got to neutralize these red states from cheating!" Cheating would be passing a policy the Left hates.
"We gotta fight fire with fire," Kamala concluded, and "We gotta be ruthless, too." Every time the Left loses in a legislative battle or a judicial ruling, the opposition is described as "ruthless."
This is how Democrats are going to campaign in 2026 and 2028. Everything is about "fighting fire with fire" by destroying all the norms, because inflamed "progressives" who speak or tweet their disappointment when Trump isn't assassinated want the Trump presidency upended immediately. The leftist media is not raising objections.
A meme on X sums up the theme in this socialist soup: "If we could just jail Trump, get rid of MAGA, end the Electoral College, stack the Supreme Court, ban voter ID, and censor free speech we could save democracy."
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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