The Absurd NeverTrump Case For Harris
Trump is a mere amateur when it comes to undermining the Constitution
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by William McRaven, a retired 4-star US Navy admiral, titled Trump Fails George Washington’s Civility Test and aimed at convincing traditional Republicans to vote for Kamala Harris rather than Donald Trump in the upcoming (actually on-going) presidential election. He cites various prescriptions of good leadership qualities and, after ticking through a list of Trump’s manifest personality faults, concludes that Trump is pretty much completely lacking in the character required of a good leader. He is too uncivil and indecent, and so the only conscionable vote available is Kamala Harris.
Please.
This is a well worn argument and has been a tedious staple of the NeverTrump right since 2016. McRaven engages in the all typical double standards necessary to such critiques, as when he laments that Trump “lies with reckless abandon”, all the while ignoring the fact that lying is pretty much ubiquitous throughout politics. Perhaps McRaven truly believes that lying with much more studied purpose is a virtue in comparison, but its not clear why. He also complains that “Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris ‘mentally impaired’ and a ‘shit vice president,’”. Apparently to McRaven calling a political opponent a threat to democracy, an existential threat to the nation, a fascist, and a racist is not nearly as offensive or disqualifying of a leader.
This is all standard fare for such critiques, magnifying Trumps not inconsiderable sins while falsely insinuating without saying that they are absent from anyone else. Just another NeverTrump double standard. But what genuinely wound me up is the fact that, not content to simply ignore the Dems, McRaven went on to explicitly absolve them.
You may not like her policies, her followers or her vision for America, but Ms. Harris won’t threaten the press, demean immigrants, mock those who have died for the country, break with our allies, or undermine the Constitution.
Are you freaking kidding me?
The Dems of course have a long history of threatening a free press, with Obama waging what reporters across the political spectrum called Obama’s war on the press, something that even the Dem-friendly New York Times couldn’t help but notice and exemplified by its secret monitoring of FOX News reporter James Rosen’s emails. In 2019, Harris herself lamented that social media sites operate “without any level of oversight or regulation”, something that she insisted “has to stop”.
And sure, Democrats don’t demean immigrants, but that is probably because they are too busy demeaning their fellow American citizens as “deplorables”, “bitter clingers”, “a threat to democracy”, and as recently as just yesterday “garbage”. I’m not sure why McRaven thinks that is more acceptable.
All anyone needs to know about the ridiculous “mocking those who died for the country” smear is that it was so cartoonishly false that even someone who thinks Trump is “too stupid to be a fascist” felt compelled to debunk it.
And who knows which allies McRaven thinks Trump “broke” with, but the closest thing in recent memory to an actual “break” with an ally has been the Biden/Harris administration’s threats to Israel over its own self-defense, threats that culminated with someone in Biden’s own government attempting to scupper Israel’s planned retaliation against our common enemy Iran by mysteriously leaking those plans a few weeks ago.
But far and away the most risible claim that McRaven makes is that a president Harris wouldn’t undermine the Constitution. What rock has he been living under?
To anyone actually familiar with both the Constitution and the Democratic party, the relevant question is not whether a Harris administration would undermine the Constitution, but rather how it will do so, as virtually every Democratic administration since Woodrow Wilson has done. Indeed, of all of the progressive left’s many hypocrisies, none is more grating than its incessant claims that its opponents are “threats to the Constitution”, for the entire progressive project has been one long and uninterrupted history of utter disdain for the Constitution.
This really is not hyperbole. The fact is that the progressive movement was birthed out of exactly that disdain. The grandfather of the modern Democratic progressivism was Woodrow Wilson who was actually quite upfront about his opinion of the Constitution as an outdated tool unfit for modern necessities. In a 1912 campaign speech titled “What Is Progress?”, also published as chapter 2 in his 1913 book The New Freedom, he explained his thoughts about the Constitution. Suggesting that the Constitution was not fit for purpose in modern society, he openly derided the notion that the three branches of government should act as “checks and balances” on each other, arguing that the various centers of federal power must instead act in concert with each other to accomplish a never-quite-defined “common task and purpose”. Characterizing the Founders’ vision of government as being “a machine” with its constituent parts constrained by Constitutional laws in the same way that a machine is constrained by Newtonian physics, he declared instead that government is actually “a living thing” that, applying Darwinian evolution, must naturally and automatically adapt to a changing environment. Knowing that the Constitution as written and originally understood was incompatible with his expansive vision of what government ought to be and do, he proposed to simply pretend otherwise:
All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
Ah yes, the magic of “interpretation”, by which Constitutional constraints on the exercise of federal power, like beaks on a bird, naturally “evolve” into and out of existence by changing conditions. Thus was born the concept of a “living constitution”, unmoored from any limiting principles, that has been the basis of progressive governance and Constitutional interpretation ever since. But of course the whole point of a Constitution is to set out principles of governance that are not circumstance dependent. If what the federal government can and cannot do at any given time is constrained not by a previously articulated principle, but instead only by what politicians or judges themselves deem to be “required” by the present circumstances, then it isn’t really constrained in any way at all.
And that is what the history of progressivism has been, a constant battle, not to honestly understand and uphold the Constitution and the concept of limited federal government embodied by it, but instead to navigate a way around it so as to expand and concentrate power in the federal government. Progressives are motivated by the substance of policy, not the substance of the Constitution, which is at most a mere afterthought, and more often a cumbersome irritant to them. They do not read the Constitution in order to see if it allows them to do what they want to do. They read it only to see how it can be construed to allow them to do what they want to do. Again, they care about the Constitution not as a matter of substance, but instead only as a talisman for legitimizing any exercise of power they seek.
Examples abound.
Wilson himself signed into law the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 which, in plain violation of the First Amendment, made it illegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States”. With the entrance of the US into World War I, Wilson apparently believed that the First Amendment had “evolved” such that it no longer protected the right to criticize the United States government.
Or consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took Wilson’s Constitution-defying theories about the administrative state and fed them steroids, expanding federal, and in particular executive, power far beyond what the Constitution had ever been understood to allow. The whole point of the Constitution, of course, was to establish a federal government of specific, limited, powers. But under FDR’s disingenuous “interpretation” of the Commerce Clause, the power of the federal government became virtually unlimited. That, again, is not hyperbole. FDR’s power grab culminated in a 1942 Supreme Court case called Wickard v Filburn, in which a SCOTUS stacked with FDR’s hand picked progressive justices agreed with FDR that the power to regulate interstate commerce gave the president the power to control action that wasn’t even commerce at all, much less interstate commerce, under the absurd theory that the failure to engage in commerce “effected” the prices of interstate commerce, and thus fell under Commerce Clause powers. This is the same theory, BTW, that was later used by the alleged Constitutional scholar Barack Obama to defend yet another Democratic assault on the Constitution, the Affordable Care Act.
And Democratic disdain for the Constitution continues under Harris’s own current boss. A mere seven months into office, Biden defied both SCOTUS and virtually all of his own legal experts by extending what even he acknowledged was the “not likely to pass constitutional muster” CDC imposed moratorium on evictions. His justification for plainly violating the Constitution, as characterized by even the Dem-friendly Washington Post, was that “Maybe it is illegal, but it’s worth it”. Just a few days ago the Biden administration announced its third attempt to bribe young voters by cancelling student debt, a power that the courts have already twice ruled does not Constitutionally belong to the President. But again he doesn’t care, because policy, not the Constitution, is what matters.
Democratic disdain for the Constitution is ubiquitous. And when they are not in power surreptitiously trying to get around the Constitution, they are openly complaining about its substance. They want to abolish the electoral college, they want to eliminate the second amendment, they think state representation in the Senate is unfair, they want SCOTUS justices to be term limited. It is often more difficult to find things in the Constitution that the left supports than it is to find things to which they object. On rare occasions they even just come out and say it openly: Let’s just get rid of the whole damn thing.
Given his appeal to honor and honesty, I hesitate to call McRaven’s assertion an outright lie. But the only alternative is that McRaven is completely ignorant of the last 100 years of political reality. That claim alone completely destroys any credibility he might have had before writing his column.
McRaven may be correct in his assessment of Trump, but his assessment of the opposition is absurd on its face. They may appear to be a bit classier, a bit nicer, but they lie, they insult and they demean every bit as effectively as Trump. They are no more qualified for the kind of leadership McRaven espouses than is Trump. And when it comes to undermining the Constitution, it isn’t even a close contest. The Dems are in a completely different league.
If it is manners and style that is important to you, then I completely understand a vote for Harris. But if you genuinely value the Constitution and the idea of limited government embodied in it, then it would be utter folly to vote for anyone in the party that has spent the last 100 years openly assaulting it. Pick your poison wisely.