It’s All About Power
“If I’m advising anybody to run for president, they sure as hell better have a solution to how you make sure that it’s not another hundred years before another black person can represent South Carolina... Some folks are thinking [Court] expansion, some folks are thinking [Court] term limits or a rotation. I’m open to whatever,” said some Democrat. I don’t know who. I am not buying a Bulwark subscription to see. But that is the quote highlighted by Sam Stein from the piece.
Who ever said it seems to think Senator Tim Scott does not exist. Before moving to the United States Senate, Tim Scott represented the First Congressional District of South Carolina, in which Fort Sumter resides. Yes, a black man represented the congressional district wherein the Civil War started and he is a Republican.
Democrats do not care. They do not care that of the 58 black members of Congress, a majority represent districts where whites outnumber blacks. They are screaming about redistricting in Tennessee, claiming how awful it is that black people will now be denied representation. The congressman who just got redistricted out of his district in Memphis is a white guy.
Identity politics breaks people’s brains.
Ten years ago yesterday, as Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination for President with a vacant Supreme Court seat most likely to be filled by Hillary Clinton, progressive Harvard Law Professor Mark Tushnet wrote a provocative piece about what the Left could do with their new found power in a 5-4 progressive Supreme Court with Hillary Clinton filling Antonin Scalia’s seat. Tushnet wrote, as Ed Whelan accurately documents,
The Left “should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided” and should “aggressively exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling.”
Rather than try to “accommodate the losers” in the culture wars, the Left should take a “hard line” against its fellow citizens. “Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War.” And “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
“Finally (trigger/crudeness alert), f*** Anthony Kennedy.” (Except Tushnet doesn’t use asterisks.)
I know a number of Republicans who opposed Donald Trump who became hardcore Trump supporters after Tushnet dropped his essay. The Left’s mindset is all about maximum power at all times.
That thinking pervades their political activism even now. They do not want to accommodate the other side. They want to wield power.
Where the Right has gone wrong in its thinking is to presume that it should wield the power in the opposite direction of the Left instead of dismantling the power. Even now, the GOP in Washington is hoarding power, refusing to destroy the power. The Left will eventually come back. We know their goals. In the United States, there is no such thing as permanence in politics.
But, with redistricting, the GOP can slow down the Left. Increasingly, progressives are realizing with the Supreme Court’s Callais decision they can no longer rely on majority-minority districts to preserve their power. The GOP, without having to draw insane lines, could gain as many as 45 seats between redistricting and a 2030 census without the flaws and errors of the 2020 census. Even the Biden Administration acknowledged how fundamentally flawed the 2020 census was.
All of this will just drive the Left further off the cliff. Between a rabid progressive burning down the Palisades in Los Angeles, which the media has still largely downplayed, to the various assassination attempts and escalating violence, the Left is going to come even more unhinged as it is pushed further from power.
But we should remember Tushnet’s stated desires ten years ago when he perceived the Left on the cusp of a Hillary Clinton presidency and a 5-4 Supreme Court progressive majority. He spoke for many of his fellow travelers.
And now, ten years later, the Left cannot even acknowledge a black man representing South Carolina as a Republican because it would interrupt their mythologies of power, victimhood, and control. The Left needs more time in the wilderness.
