House Democrat Ro Khanna took to the floor to call for term limits on Supreme Court justices and to immediately expand the Court from 9 to 13 justices. Democrats seek to thwart justice by packing the Court. (They have also suggested defunding the Supreme Court.) Democrats must believe their party will win the midterm elections and replace the executive branch with a Democratic Party-led administration. They may not have realized it, but they just gave Republicans another plank for their 2026 platform.
History buffs will remember that Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the Court in 1937. His Judicial Procedures Reform bill failed thanks to principled Democrats in the Senate. The JPR rejected Roosevelt’s plan by a 10-to-8 vote. Roosevelt’s scheme explicitly aimed to neutralize conservative opposition to his New Deal programs, i.e., the vast project to expand the administrative state (which, unfortunately, was largely successful in institutionalizing the corporate state). The proposal was an egregious violation of the separation of powers.
The reality is that no rights have been taken away from black people. The Democrats are telling an absurd lie. Every adult black man and woman who is a citizen and hasn’t committed a felony can register to vote and participate in our democracy. But Democrats don’t think in terms of individuals. They’re tribalists. They always have been. The same mentality that justified racial slavery and Jim Crow rationalizes organizing the vote by race. This style of identitarian politics has no place in a nation founded on personal liberty, where each citizen is equal before the law.
The Constitution is colorblind. It privileges no class of people. Has Khanna not read Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)? He should—and learn which side of history a moral person stands on. (See Justice Harlan’s Color-Blind Constitution and the Abolition of Racial Gerrymandering.) But he does not seem to be well-read. And he and his brethren are certainly bereft of principle.
Democrats were beside themselves when the Supreme Court overturned racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). It took the Civil Rights Act (1964) to put an end to the apartheid Harlan found so repugnant. Ro Khanna’s party filibustered the CRA in the Senate. Remember that? One of the filibusterers, a former Klan leader, Robert Byrd, Exalted Cyclops of the West Virginian Klavern, went on to become the Senate majority leader. No evil deed goes unrewarded in the Democratic Party.
Once more, the Supreme Court had to step in and stop the Democrats from obviating the foundation of the American Republic. Just like their party ancestors, Democrats see Louisiana v. Callais as a setback. Of course they do. Unprincipled partisan power drives the logic of their politics and policies. So does the paternalism that infantilizes black Americans (which I analyze in a forthcoming essay on this platform). Racial gerrymandering is the same genus of racism as affirmative action and DEI. Those days are over—if good and decent people have anything to say about it.
Democrats can dress their racism in any clothes they like, but the threads are always imaginary, and we can see nakedness. Mutual knowledge has removed the dark shroud of the Democratic Party’s ambitions of one-party rule. One of the greatest mistakes in the history of this nation is allowing Democrats to survive Reconstruction. They deserve the same treatment that the Nazi Party received in Germany after WWII. They should be thankful for the First Amendment they seek to limit and weaponize in a myriad of ways.
freedom and reason 