Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Is the Supreme Court Why I’m a Republican? Or Used to be?

Nora Ephron at HuffPo:

It’s hard to be a Democrat, don’t you think? There’s no alternative, of course, but it’s hard. Someone asked me the other day to write something about why I was a Democrat, and I had no trouble making a list of 10 reasons. Of course, five of those reasons were the Supreme Court, and the other five were more or less historical—reasons like FDR, which is not meant to mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly but some fantasy blob of Democratic values that are a distant racial memory.

Which got me thinking. What are the ten reasons I’m a Republican and would the Supreme Court amount to half? There being no alternative to being a Republican, after all. (But see infra.) In no particular order:

1. It’s the party of Lincoln, which freed the slaves and kept the Union together (Historical fantasy blob)


2. Low taxes


3. Pro-life (SCOTUS)


4. Small government


5. Respects federalism (half point for SCOTUS)


6. Strong defense


7. Realist foreign policy that pursues national interests


8. Nostalgia for Ronald Reagan (Historical fantasy blob)


9. Pro-business and economic growth


10. Anti-communist (Historical fantasy blob)

So the Supreme Court counts for only about 1.5 out of ten. This isn’t surprising, of course. It’s the left that relies on judges at least as much as on politics to achieve their ends, after all. As John Leo observed:

In part, relying on judges for political decisions is the result of a conscious strategy within the Democratic Party, as political analyst William Galston of the University of Maryland said last week. Galston, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, says his party “convinced itself that, especially on social issues, the principal vehicle of advance would be the court.” It’s easier to find a judge or two to rule your way than to go through the drudgery of building a majority for normal democratic decision making, particularly if you are pushing a liberal agenda in a conservative age.

But then, as I pondered the list some more, it occured to me that it ought to be entitled “10 reasons I used to be a Republican and now had to find the alternative of being a disgruntled independent.” My taxes would be low, except for the fact that Bush has done nothing about the AMT, which basically vitiates the effect of his tax cuts for those of us in high tax states. The government keeps getting bigger on Bush’s watch and it’s not all driven by the GWOT. Speaking of the GWOT, so much for a realist foreign policy. Ditto a strong defense. We’re going to leave Iraq with an Army almost as busted as the one that left Vietnam. As for federalism, Jonathan Adler observed that “President Bush, for one, spoke quite a bit about the need for state flexibility when he was a Governor and a candidate, but seems to have forgotten about such things over the past six years.”

Grump.