The Anti-Constitution of Joe Biden - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Anti-Constitution of Joe Biden
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Joe Biden (YouTube screenshot)

Joe Biden has promised to complete the “fundamental transformation” of America that Barack Obama started. Toward that end, he vows to radicalize the judiciary. He intends to stack it with as many liberal activists as possible, whose rulings would eliminate the actual Constitution in favor of a warped worldview rooted in a political and moral philosophy alien to the founding fathers.

What we’ve seen on display this week is simply a reprisal of Biden’s browbeating of Bork for not adjusting his jurisprudence to the “tradition of progress.”

The hearings this week provide a window on that warped worldview, one that insists judges deliver health and death at the same time. One moment, the Democrats bashed Amy Coney Barrett for not supporting health care; in the next, they excoriated her for not denying it to unborn children.

The Democrats surrounded themselves with pictures of young children who could lose Obamacare. Yet they remain unmoved by the far more arresting images of unborn children killed under it. The party of “science” averts its gaze from sonograms.

Opposed to litmus tests this week — they grilled Barrett on whether she had made any promises to Trump — the Democrats itch to impose their own should Biden win the presidency. Biden has promised only judges who pledge to uphold abortion rights.

To the extent that Biden has a judicial philosophy, it is that judges should ignore, not uphold, the Constitution whenever it conflicts with liberalism’s goals. Biden’s “living Constitution” is an anti-Constitution — a blank piece of paper on which liberal jurists can write the exact opposite of what the founders intended.

Biden has said his ideal judge is one who invents rights out of thin air. The more unstated rights he finds in the Constitution, the better. Biden has offered up this gibberish in defense of that view:

I argued and continued to argue, and the bulk of academia agree with this now, is that if in fact there is a right to privacy in the Constitution — it’s not mentioned, it’s the Ninth Amendment, there are a number of rights in the Constitution — it’s also there are a number of other rights that exist that relate to how you view whether or not all the amendments taken together in the constitutional body actually protects people in their privacy. And so they’re the kind of judge — I would look to judges, potential nominees, they would have to acknowledge the fact that there are unenumerated rights that are nonetheless constitutional rights; they’re not mentioned by name in the Constitution.

It is this kind of brilliance that placed Biden at the bottom of his Syracuse law school class.

Biden was the father of Borking. He turned hearings into tests not of the nominee’s legal credentials but of the nominee’s perceived political views. Biden projected his own wholly political conception of judging on to Bork, dismissing him as a conduit of the “Reagan–Meese” agenda. Even the Washington Post at that time found Biden’s approach crude:

While claiming that Judge Bork will have a full and fair hearing, Senator Joseph Biden this week has pledged to civil rights groups that he will lead the opposition to the confirmation. As the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Sentence first — Verdict Afterward.”

How can he possibly get a fair hearing from Biden, who has already cast himself in the role of prosecutor instead of a juror in the Judiciary Committee? If there is a strong, serious case to be argued against Judge Bork, why do so many Democrats seem unwilling to make it and afraid to listen to the other side?

What we’ve seen on display this week is simply a reprisal of Biden’s browbeating of Bork for not adjusting his jurisprudence to the “tradition of progress.” What Bork said in reply to Biden’s baiting remains relevant: “If a judge abandons intention as his guide, there is no law available to him, and he begins to legislate a social agenda for the American people.… The truth is that the judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else.”

A Biden presidency would revive the raw activism of the Obama years and reduce the judiciary to a political appendage of the legislative and executive branches, a prescription for left-wing tyranny. This is the final installment of Obama’s “fundamental transformation.”

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” said John Adams. It would have come as an enormous surprise to the founding fathers to learn that Christianity is an impediment to constitutional jurisprudence, the suggestion made by Democrats who fear that the “dogma lives loudly within” Barrett.

In Joe Biden’s America, the absence, not the presence, of Christian virtue will equip a judge for service — a perverse measure of the distance his “living Constitution” has traveled from the real one.

George Neumayr is author of The Biden Deception.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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