Whenever my astonished eyes alight on one of Hugh Hewitt’s sprightly jaunts down the cobblestone courts of Crazy Town, I wonder how The Washington Post chooses its conservative contributors — and whether they could find equally trenchant analyses from, say, a random Reddit user, or the next guy who gets arrested for masturbating in a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Because, damn, the dude is — how do you say it? — insane in the membrane.
His latest bizarro screed consists entirely of lauding Mitch McConnell for micturating upon the Constitution and thereby supposedly saving the very document the senator had just soiled:
Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, the court would have shifted quickly and far to the left with just the replacement of Scalia with a liberal activist. If Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had retired and a second liberal justice — even a fairly judicious one such as Merrick Garland — assumed the chair, the court would have been off on a decades-long, perhaps irreversible, lurch into judicial supremacy. Instead, the Supreme Court and lower courts will remain committed to constitutional textualism and to the personal liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Wait, are you talking about the kind of judicial supremacy that — gee, I don’t know — allows a handful of unelected justices to select the president of the United States? Or to gut the Voting Rights Act? Heaven forfend!
Ah, but Hewitt has a really selective memory. He goes so far as to say McConnell’s craven dirty trick should be rebranded “the McConnell Miracle” (whereas I thought the McConnell miracle was that he’s somehow managed to live this long outside of his shell).
It is not an overstatement to say that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has saved the Constitution as we know it. By that I mean the Constitution as it was originally written and subsequently amended and interpreted in Supreme Court rulings, not as the “living Constitution” enthusiasts wish it were or one yet to be interpreted — a sort of super-legislature imposing on the country its own vision of “the good.”
I can just about guarantee you this: If/when Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed (despite his repeated perjuries), judicial activism will make a big comeback — and you’ll see our Constitution thoroughly origami’d to suit Republicans’ needs, the needs of their corporate masters, and the petulant demands of their orange suzerain.
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Yo! Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing is now available at Amazon! Buy there (or at one of the other fine online retailers carrying it), or be square.
