Elections have become not merely choices of policy change but referenda on the full-scale, top-to-bottom destruction of America’s form of government and way of life.
Democratic Party candidates in the 2024 election have proposed policies that would radically, and irrevocably, alter America’s constitutional order. Liberal candidates have endorsed plans that would fundamentally transform all three branches of government, assure permanent left-wing power, and effect the domination of American politics by a polarized ideological minority.
1. Stacking the Supreme Court
No institution has experienced such a concerted and sustained attack on its “legitimacy” than the U.S. Supreme Court.
After decades of activists dominating the judicial branch, former President Donald Trump appointed three justices that tilted the court in an originalist direction, sparking instant cries to change the number of justices for the first time since 1869. This would allow the Biden-Harris administration to “expand the court” and pack it with liberal judicial activists.
Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Democratic Party debate has centered not on whether candidates should stack the Supreme Court but how openly it should take place. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, no fewer than 11 Democratic presidential hopefuls supported court-packing or were “open” to it.
Although he opposed the notion during the primaries, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14023 shortly after taking office, establishing a panel to study the issue.
“The risks of Court expansion are considerable, including that it could undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the Court’s legitimacy,” concluded the commission’s 198 pages of discussion materials, not least because court-packing could be “perceived by many as a partisan maneuver.”
Since the number of Supreme Court justices is not enumerated in the Constitution, dissatisfied members of Congress have introduced court-packing legislation of their own.
Last July, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced the Judiciary Act to add four new justices to the Supreme Court, inflating the court to 13 members. The “Planned Parenthood Federation of America is proud to support the Judiciary Act,” said the bill’s official press release.
In September, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act (S. 5229), which would expand the Supreme Court to 15 members, force the Senate to schedule a vote on Supreme Court nominations within six months, and require a two-thirds supermajority before the Supreme Court could overturn any act of Congress.
During a speech in Austin this July, Biden proposed three “reforms” to the Supreme Court. The most consequential would establish an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, which would mandatorily retire three of the court’s center-right bloc: Justice Clarence Thomas (who has served 33 years); Chief Justice John Roberts (19 years); and Justice Samuel Alito (18 years), who is the author of the Dobbs decision.
Biden waited so long, because he has some sense of institutional history. Vice President Kamala Harris has no such grounding. In 2020, then-freshman Sen. Harris denounced the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett as an “illegitimate process.” (Ironically, undermining citizens’ faith in their own government is a cornerstone of Russian propaganda.)
Now that the Democratic Party has sidelined Biden, Harris’ efforts to pack the Supreme Court have gone into overdrive. Candidate Harris said she was “open to this conversation about increasing the number of people on the United States Supreme Court” during a 2019 campaign stop in New Hampshire and reiterated, “I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the court” at this month’s CNN town hall. The issues section of the Harris-Walz website, dubbed “A New Way Forward,” endorses “requiring [j]ustices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits.”
The Founding Fathers intended lifetime tenure to give Supreme Court justices the requisite independence “to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” from “the arts of designing men,” “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers (No. 78). “If, then, the courts of justice are to be considered as the bulwarks of a limited Constitution against legislative encroachments,” then “nothing will contribute so much as this to that independent spirit” engendered by the “permanent tenure of judicial offices.”
The Legal Left has artificed an argument that eliminating lifetime tenure would not require a constitutional amendment, as long as the legislation shifted justices to lower courts.
The Left aims to remove all obstacles to its radical agenda.
“Court-packing would not simply alter the structure of the Supreme Court—it would convert it into a subsidiary of the other branches, destroying our constitutional order,” said First Liberty Executive General Counsel Hiram Sasser. A litany of Supreme Court cases—including Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Bostock v. Clayton County—shows the harm an unelected group of judicial radicals can inflict on the nation’s republican and moral order.
2. Stacking the Congress
The radical Left is not content with merely changing the Supreme Court; it aims for permanent control of all three branches of the federal government. Democratic proposals would radically reshape the legislative branch, as well.
Perhaps the most extreme and least noted attempt to assure liberal control over the legislature is the Democratic Party’s Congress-packing scheme of adding up to six new states to the United States, bringing with them 12 senators and approximately eight members of the House of Representatives.
“We unequivocally support statehood for D.C.,” declares the 2024 Democratic Party platform. “Democrats support self-determination for Puerto Rico. … Democrats also support self-determination for the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. We will create a Congressional task force to study equal voting rights and House representation.”
It is important to note that Congress already allows representation for U.S. territories. Although these elected officials do not vote on final passage of legislation in the House, they take part in committee hearings and committee votes. Further, three of these proposed “states” would qualify as America’s tiniest jurisdictions; American Samoa (49,710) would have one-tenth the population of America’s smallest state, conservative Wyoming (population 576,851).
Most importantly, these territories are far more liberal than the U.S. mainland. Voters in Puerto Rico are less than half as likely as other Americans to identify with the Republican Party, and only 5% of voters in the District of Columbia are registered Republicans. The Democrats’ Congress-packing scheme would move the nation’s legislative center-of-gravity far to the Left.
Democrats already overrepresent liberal areas by counting illegal immigrants in the U.S. census. Each congressional district represents roughly 700,000 people; there are a minimum of 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States, although the number is likely far higher. Counting them packs additional members into Congress, particularly in sanctuary cities or states.
An inaccurate U.S. census count redistributes eight congressional seats, according to one expert analysis. It gives extra seats to California (3), Texas (2), New York, New Jersey, and Florida (one each); and it takes seats away from Alabama, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, and West Virginia (one seat each). Illegal immigrants alone transfer one seat each from Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota to California, Texas, and New York. This also impacts the presidency, as we will see below.
Finally, the Democratic Party aims to curb small-d democratic control over the election of members of Congress under the guise of fighting “gerrymandering.” Proposals such as Ohio Proposition 1 would replace the current status quo—in which House voting maps are drawn up by elected state officials—with an unelected board of “experts.” These efforts, which have been underway for a long time, are led by such groups as All On the Line, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and the National Redistricting Action Fund.
Hungarian-born billionaire “Democratic donor George Soros was the single largest contributor to the committee in 2018, giving $2.6 million in 2018,” reported OpenSecrets.org. The most visible spokesperson for this plan is former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who inverted Michelle Obama’s statement “When they go low, we go high” to “When they go low, we kick them.” Is it likely Obama’s self-described “wingman” would preside over a nonpartisan undertaking?
3. Stacking the Presidency
Although the Democratic Party has held the presidency 12 of the last 16 years, it remains outraged that constitutional precepts hold back a more permanent grasp.
The Democratic Party already maximizes its advantages by counting illegal immigrants in the U.S. census. By shifting congressional power toward blue states, counting noncitizens in the census also increases the number of Electoral College votes controlled by blue states.
The greater concern is not just that illegal immigrants are counted in the census; it is that they are also voting in U.S. elections. Some sanctuary jurisdictions openly allow noncitizens to vote, although purportedly not for federal office. But the widespread distribution of absentee ballots, coupled with loose standards governing the registration of voters under a 1993 federal bill, create a perfect storm for illegal immigrant voter fraud.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act requires government employees to offer to register anyone who obtains a driver’s license to vote, but a federal court ruling prohibits officials from verifying that those who register are U.S. citizens. This has led to noncitizens registering and voting in U.S. elections.
As this reporter has noted at The Washington Stand:
- In Pennsylvania, Department of State official Jonathan Marks testified that noncitizens voluntarily told the state they had illegally voted 544 times in elections held between 2000 and 2017—representing one of every 172,000 votes cast in the swing state.
- An official review of Georgia’s voting rolls found 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote in the swing state between 1997 and 2002.
- Virginia removed 5,556 noncitizens from its voting rolls between 2011 and 2017. Noncitizens had voted 7,474 times between 1988 and 2017, officials found.
- North Carolina voter rolls showed 1,454 registered voters who “did not appear to be naturalized before Election Day 2014,” according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and “89 attempted to vote.”
Once cast, there is no way to differentiate which ballot belongs to a specific person; voter fraud is permanent.
The Democratic Party opposes any efforts to rein in this abuse, although it is opposed by a supermajority of Americans: 83% of Americans—including two-thirds of Democrats — favor requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., has said the House must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to address this “clear and very real threat” to election integrity.
Further, the Left aims to remove the final constitutional restraint on its power by abolishing the Electoral College. The New York Times even declared, “The Electoral College Is the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy.”
The Founding Fathers, well-versed on the destructive nature of pure democracies, established a constitutional democracy where no majority could deprive an individual of his or her God-given, unalienable rights. They also forged a system that required candidates to seek national unity by representing all areas and regional interests of the country. In addition to other problems with a national popular vote, without the Electoral College, elections would be dominated by massive population centers, which are far more liberal than rural areas.
The Left aims at a permanent realignment of American society from a constitutional republic to a European-style welfare state, with greater division along the lines of race and ethnicity. It has proposed policies that would accomplish that aim. And this election, it plans to implement them.
“When the Left loses by the rules they put in place, they try to change the rules,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” recently. “It’s pathetic.”
But left unchecked, America may face a future of perpetual dominance by the radical Left.
Originally published by The Washington Stand
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Ben Johnson.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.