The Senate vote on Friday on the confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court will clearly display the Democrats’ hostility toward our Constitution and toward representative democracy itself.
Judge Gorsuch is an originalist. Throughout his career as a jurist, he has always applied the Constitution as written without regard to his own policy preferences.
Democrats are threatened by originalism because they depend on left-wing judges to impose on the American people leftist policies that the people’s representatives in Congress are unwilling to enact through the legislative process set forth in our Constitution.
Democrats seek to nullify the Constitution by calling it a “living and breathing document.” As masters of propaganda, they understand that this formulation falsely implies that conservatives consider the Constitution to be a “dead” document.
What the Democrats mean by “living and breathing” is that judges can and should “interpret” the Constitution to impose leftist policies on the country.
The “living and breathing document” formulation is not a valid judicial philosophy. It is tyranny.
America was founded to be the world’s first modern representative democracy. The core value of our entire system of government and laws is that the government exists to serve the people, not to rule us.
Our founding proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, stated that it is “self-evident” that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In other words, at the moment we declared ourselves independent, we also declared that our new government would be one with powers limited only to those expressly granted to it by the people it exists to serve.
To that end, the preamble to the Constitution expressly states that “We the People of the United States . . . ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It is therefore self-evident that any philosophy that allows unelected judges to change the meaning and contents of the Constitution from what we the people intended at the time of its ratification is invalid and contrary to our country’s core values.
Yet it is precisely because Judge Gorsuch steadfastly applies the Constitution as intended by the people who ratified it that the Democrats oppose him.
The Democrats insist that only leftists who will abuse their judicial authority to change the Constitution to impose leftist policies on the people should be allowed to serve on the Supreme Court.
Through leftist judicial activism, the Democrats seek to render the Constitution meaningless and rule the country without our consent. Their votes against Judge Gorsuch are quite literally votes against the Constitution and representative democracy itself.
It is vital that the Republicans defend the Constitution and the right of the people to self-governance by ensuring that the Democrats fail in their attempted judicial coup.
Author: Ken Falkenstein
Ken Falkenstein is the Managing Editor of Committed Conservative and brings a wealth of experience and expertise in public affairs to the job. Ken served in the U.S. Army in the last years of the Cold War as a Russian linguist for military intelligence and the NSA. After leaving the Army, he earned his degree in Secondary Education from Old Dominion University, where he also wrote a popular column in the student newspaper.
Upon graduation, Ken worked as a Legislative Aide to two Republican members of the Virginia House of Delegates. Ken also served as Corresponding Secretary of the Young Republican Federation of Virginia, managed several successful political campaigns, and managed governmental affairs operations for a local Realtor association.
In 1995, Ken moved to Washington, DC to serve as a Legislative Assistant to Sen. John Warner (R-VA). While working for Sen. Warner, Ken attended law school at night, earning his J.D. with honors from the George Mason University School of Law (n/k/a The Antonin Scalia Law School). Since that time, Ken has practiced as a civil litigation attorney, including serving for three years as an Associate City Attorney for the City of Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Ken previously was a contributor to the highly-regarded political blog Bearing Drift and was a weekly co-host of The Steve Batton Radio Program. In 2016, Ken ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia Beach School Board. Ken is also a former President of the Down Syndrome Association of Hampton Roads.
Ken now lives outside of Denver, Colorado with his wife, Kim, and three sons, Adam, Dylan, and Joshua, who has Down syndrome. Ken’s writing is motivated and informed primarily by his concern for his kids’ future.
