The Democratic Party vs. The Supreme Court
John Vecchione at FrumForum detects a pattern of Democratic Party truculence toward Supreme Court decisions–going all the way back to Andrew Jackson, folks!–reviving after Citizens United and McDonald:
Comes news from the Windy City that in response to the resounding victory for Second Amendment Rights in McDonald v. Chicago the Mayor and City Counsel have turned to the city's problems in a manner designed to protect constitutional liberties. Just kidding. They have instituted a scheme of "massive resistance."
Mayor Daley has said he will not "roll over" to the Supreme Court. Now, I'm as much for not treating Supreme Court pronouncements as gospel as the next guy (presuming he has an "Impeach Warren" bumper sticker down in the basement), but this is really a scandal. This is not a made-up right we have come to expect from the Court. Yet Chicago, the President's home town, has in four days set out to resist, resist, resist the clear import of the Court's decision. President Obama has said nothing.
In the same vein, when the Supreme Court, logically determined that a law that prohibits speech about elections before an election and states how much a person can spend on such speech is not in accord with the First Amendment's command that Congress "shall make no law" prohibiting speech, the Democrats went berserk. Did they quote: "I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it." Nope. George Will lays out a bit of what they did here. Worse, the Democrats and the President have used the Court's decision to attack the Court in terms that explicitly state that they want to curtail speech by interests they do not like. The President sent Elena Kagan to tell the Court that the campaign finance laws gave the government the right to ban books. The Supremes gave her a hard time. In his State of the Union address President Obama chastised them for this. Al Franken specifically attacked the decision because he did not like the speech he thought would be allowed.
The partisan spin on this is silly–objections to Supreme Court actions based on policy preferences are reliably bipartisan, shaped by all the usual concerns over particular gored oxes–but sometimes without rank partisanship, we'd never get good commentary defending rights against the particular bastard the pundit hates already for different reasons.
Nick Gillespie on "Dems United Against Citizens United."
