In his brilliant, profound Washington Post column of October 13, 2020,[1] Michael Gerson describes a magical garden, a rose garden, where once a mad king gathered his most loyal supporters. This lover of fairy tales recounts how the mad king told this group of supporters and sycophants that he would give each of them a golden apple (aka a conservative Supreme Court justice) representing what they wanted most in life if they would simply accept in their lives a harmless virus, which would trouble them little and soon go away. Their acceptance of this virus would help him advance his plans for the kingdom. He said that the apple—as they themselves could see—was without outward flaw. Such an offer his most loyal and obedient subjects could not decline. The golden apple would set things right for each of them in a world populated by so many unbelievers.
In offering this golden apple to pro-life subjects, the mad king would possibly give them a reliable fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Overturning that ruling, however, would not end abortion as they may believed, but simply return it to the uncertainties of state regulation. These subjects would receive this wonderful gift if they simply would ignore the tens of thousands (becoming hundreds of thousands) deaths from the virus. “But wouldn’t we save many more lives by banning abortions?” his supporters thought to themselves.
For those subjects whose primary interest was establishing a nation with a broad conservative judiciary, the king offered a generation-long dominance of the Supreme Court by prompt Senate confirmation of the golden apple to take a seat on the Court. In 2016 Republicans had blocked the confirmation of a highly qualified candidate for the Court nominated in February of that year, loudly declaiming that the nomination was much too close to the presidential election for the Senate to take a step with such long-term potential consequences. Now in 2020 a golden apple is nominated in October while citizens are already voting! The nomination of one whose legal views are essentially diametrically opposed to the much-loved Justice whose seat she would assume underscores the hypocrisy of the Republican Senate majority. Such hasty action taken without any real explanation or justification except the corrupt use of power invites retribution and will be long remembered—far longer than anyone’s present tenure in the Senate or on the Supreme Court.
The king’s golden apple would be a gift to subjects with a conservative legal ideology—the Federalist society—giving them a Supreme Court committed to judicial restraint, keeping the current legal structure in place despite changes in the country—contrary to the wishes of our founders who gave us a Constitution that could move with the times. In return for this prize the mad king simply asked that the Federalists continue to support him, a king who has always despised any restraint or check on what he wants to do, a king who cares nothing for the rule of law. Even now he is targeting his political enemies through false and fantastic charges, even threatening to jail his election opponent. This mad king will never agree to any peaceful transition from his royal place. Thus, his offer is tainted for these subjects, as well as the others. He will give them the gifts of power that they want, but only if they abandon all of their own principles and sense of honor.
Is it worth it? Michael Gerson had this to say in closing:
In the final, decadent days of the mad king’s rule, all these groups within the Republican coalition are being made the same offer: power in exchange for the public disgracing of their ideals. The response was evident in the garden: the hand-shaking and air-kissing of the maskless, the faithless and the doomed.
Even if our Founders never encountered any human being as evil, corrupt, unhinged or incompetent as the mad king, they nonetheless had something to say about the possibility:
“If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is, that every man has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of American martyrs; but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation.” — James Madison, 1793
“If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper, Number 33, 1788
“Judges should always be men [and women] of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness, coolness and attention. Should not have their minds distracted with complicated jarring interests, nor be subservient to any man or body of men, or more complaisant to one than another.” — John Adams, 1776
“The natural cure for an ill administration in a popular or representative constitution is a change of men.” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Number 21, 1787
“Change of men,” for sure!
John Jay
[1] Gerson, Michael, “Dark trade-offs of a fairy tale,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2020, p. A-23.