Progressive Leftists vs. Common Sense by Robert Curry

Have you heard this one? A federal judge has ruled that the all-male military draft is unconstitutional.

How did you feel about this bit of news when you first learned of it? Did you think the ruling was ridiculous? An outrage? Did you feel hopeless about what is happening to our country? All of the above?

Not long ago, another federal judge ruled that the Constitution requires that male prisoners who identify as female must be provided with sex-change surgery and hormone-replacement therapy at the taxpayer’s expense, and be transferred to a prison for women.

There is so much to comment on here. For one thing, these rulings make it perfectly clear that we no longer live in a free, self-governing country. Instead of governing ourselves by means of our votes, increasingly we are subject to the dictates of judges who rule over us by managing to find the darnedest things in the Constitution. Like magicians pulling rabbits out of hats, judges can be counted on to astonish and amaze us with the wizardry by which they perform their conjuring tricks.

Read and re-read the Constitution—please!—but you won’t find anything in it to support these rulings. What you will find, however, are the rules that make clear how the federal government is supposed to work—how we are to do elections, how the powers of government are divided among the three branches of government, and so on. You can be sure the Framers did not put these rabbits in the Constitution and that they would be as amazed by these acts of judicial sorcery as you are.

Of course, the problem with these rulings is not limited to judges making free with the Constitution. That alone is outrageous enough, but it’s not enough for them. Isn’t it clear by now that in addition to the initial outrages they are now delighting in rubbing our noses in them? The more outrageous the ruling, the better it is from the progressive point of view.

Obviously, these preposterous rulings make great material to be enjoyed when progressives get together to celebrate what they are getting away with and the frustration of ordinary Americans about what they are doing—but what makes them so enjoyable from the progressive point of view are the affronts to plain common sense. They want us to understand what they are doing to us and what they mean to do.

There are plenty of ordinary Americans who don’t pay much attention to rulings on fine points of the law but who have no difficulty recognizing when common sense is being tossed out the window. They can tell the difference between common sense and nonsense—and they are certain that America’s Founders intended for judges to follow the law as written together with, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, “the plain dictate of common sense.” Consequently, ordinary Americans have no difficulty recognizing these rulings for what they are.

By not following the law and ruling against common sense, these decisions and others like them by progressive judges make a double mockery of the law. If the law means whatever they say, no matter how absurd, then we cease to be a people and a nation ruling ourselves under the law.

But wait, there’s more. We are less and less able to rule ourselves even by voting directly on questions that should not even need a vote because they are matters of simple common sense.

In 2000, California voters tried to shore up the common sense meaning of marriage by means of the initiative process. They voted to make it state law that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in California. That such a law would ever be needed is astonishing. And the vote was 61 percent in favor to 39 percent against—in California! However, that law was soon overturned by the California Supreme Court in a narrow 4-3 ruling—that is, by the vote of one judge.

The voters in California tried again. In 2008, they overthrew the court’s ruling by amending the state constitution—only to have that amendment declared unconstitutional by a federal judge. The judge overruled the voters and, at the same time, the common sense understanding of marriage—using the Constitution to do it. You can’t make this stuff up.

But there is still more yet. Now people in government are trying to take the choice of who is to represent us in government out of our hands. The ruling elite strongly disapproved of the American people’s choice for president of the United States in 2016. They promptly set out on a two-pronged strategy, first to correct this mistake by the voters and second to make sure it would never happen again.

The people in the ruling elite are working hard to prevent President Trump from completing his term in office and they don’t care how they get it done. By attempting to use the 25th Amendment; by deploying Robert Mueller and his gang of partisans subverting justice; by a constant barrage of hatred in the press and among academics and outspoken celebrities, it does not matter. They are all designed to break the president’s spirit, any way, anyhow, and everything at once.

By the way, what is it that they are trying to overturn? Why, the election of the president according to the Constitution, of course.

In addition, so as to make sure it never happens again, our progressive elite is violating one of the most basic rules of common sense having to do with our survival as a country. By throwing open America’s borders and attracting a wave of illegal aliens with promises of sanctuary and free health care and welfare, they intend to make sure no outsider not approved by them will ever be elected to the presidency again. And just for good measure they are working on overturning the Electoral College so that the opinions of smaller, more rural, and more Republican states don’t carry as much weight.

Once upon a time the progressives were all about overturning the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But ever progressing, they are no longer content with putting an end to the regime of the Founders, the regime rightly called the best in the history of the world. That the progressives have moved on to attacking common sense tells us something important. It means they feel certain their victory over the Founders is a done deal, is now a certainty, freeing them up to take on our common sense understanding of the world that makes the Founders’ idea of self-rule possible.