Is The Right Blinded by Nostalgia for the Constitution?

The Left never tires of insulting the right with its perceptions of us. We are naïve, rigid in our ideas, react irrationally to the idea of change and are wedded to the Constitution. These can all be summed up in our preoccupation with “nostalgia.” We threaten Democracy at every turn, and we don’t recognize that the expert elites of our country know what’s best for us.

Oh, please.

The latest attacks being offered are from two popular sources. The first is Kamala Harris who believes that we continue to support systems that don’t work:

‘I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,’ she said. That ‘nostalgia,’ according to Harris, is preventing us from doing things like packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.

A second expert on our disabling nostalgia was California Governor Gavin Newsom:

Newsom, who is eyeing a run for president in 2028, sidestepped that ideological conflict: ‘Certainly, nostalgia is not working. I would argue socialism is not going to work, but capitalism as we know it doesn't work either.’

Misguided nostalgia of conservatives is the source of all our serious issues today according to the left. Yet our reliance on the Constitution, a document that was never intended to be perfect, is in part based on its standing the test of time. But the Democratic Socialist of America group thinks that our nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate (an elitist institution); the presidency (which has acted in authoritarian ways); and the expansion of the Supreme Court (which needs to be enlarged "to better represent the people." Translate: to help Democrats reach their aspirations).

One of the most radical screeds appeared in an opinion from the Hawaii Supreme Court against the federal Supreme Court:

This week, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that ‘The Roberts Court sees only white.’ It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that ‘overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.’

It is an opinion that would make an MS NOW host blush. But it follows a pattern on the left to get people to turn against our institutions and even against the Constitution itself.

This rant from the Hawaii Court is just one more attack on the judiciary and the presidency, all of which reveal the courts' disdain for our branches of government and the rule of law.

These attacks have emerged from the progressive theory of judicial interpretation that finally took root in the 1930s:

According to that theory, laws in general and the Constitution in particular should be regarded as ‘living’ documents, the meaning of which could and should be manipulated to suit changing conditions and changing ideas of what is desirable. The theory also held that, rather than trying objectively to interpret and enforce the checks and balances specified by the Constitution, courts should simply presume the constitutionality of any legislation that was not clearly irrational. Given the extent to which the Constitution was predicated on the presumption of liberty, that was quite a stretch, and the Supreme Court resisted the progressive theory of law for a long time. Under intense pressure from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, it ultimately capitulated in the 1930s, and progressive legal theory became official legal doctrine.

Rather than leading to an enlightened government led by expert elites, Jonathan Turley assures us the results would be disastrous if these plans were enacted:

Of course, history has shown that such radical proposals ultimately produce not democracy, but what the Framers called mobocracy. If we let that happen, many Americans will indeed look back at the last 250 years with a tragic sense of nostalgia.

[originally published in American Thinker]