“I shall resist any illegal federal court order.”
When “the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong,” the president should refuse to follow it.
Those two statements were made roughly 60 years apart. The first is from segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D). The second was made by two liberal professors this month.
In one of the most chilling developments in our history, the left has come to embrace the authoritarian language and logic of segregationists in calling for defiance and radical measures against the Supreme Court.
In a recent open letter, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.” Thus, in light of the court’s bar on the use of race in college admissions, they argue that Biden should just continue to follow his own constitutional interpretation.
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Tushnet and Belkin know their audience. Biden has previously evinced little respect for the Constitution or the courts. Take the eviction case. In an earlier decision, a majority of justices had declared that Biden’s actions were unconstitutional, confirming what many of us had said for months.
Even after the majority declared it unconstitutional, Biden wanted to reissue the national moratorium. White House counsel and most scholars told him the move would be blatantly unconstitutional and defy the express ruling of the court. Instead, he consulted the only law professor willing to tell him what he wanted to hear and did it anyway. It was quickly again declared unconstitutional.
Other commentators and academics have gone from implied to open contempt for our constitutional norms.
Georgetown University Law School Professor Rosa Brooks was celebrated for her appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” after declaring that Americans are “slaves” to the U.S. Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.
MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has questioned the need for a Supreme Court.
In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
So the danger is now “constitutionalism,” as opposed to what Tushnet and Belkin call “popular constitutionalism.”
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In other words, they are calling for Biden to declare himself the final arbiter of what the Constitution means and to exercise unilateral executive power without congressional approval. He is to become a government unto himself.
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More:
https://thehill.com/opinion/judicia...urge-biden-to-defy-the-courts-and-the-public/
