Balance

In arguing, as I have argued many times in this blog, for a balanced Supreme Court, Peggy Noonan writes:

When the court is roughly balanced, 5-4, the public is allowed to assume some rough approximation of justice will occur—that something that looks like justice will be handed down. There will be chafing and disappointments. ObamaCare will be upheld. Yay! Boo! Gay marriage will be instituted across the land. Yay! Boo!

The closeness of the vote suggests both sides got heard. The closeness contributes to an air of credibility. That credibility helps people accept the court’s rulings.

A court that is unbalanced (either to the Right or to the Left) reeks of judicial coercion and as a consequence, will be less respected by the people. That's not a good thing, yet extremists on both the Left and the Right want to load the court to exercise their ideological will. That's a serious mistake.

But it's Noonan's dissection of the the Left's position in all of this that's most interesting. During the Obama years, the Left has ascended. Barack Obama gave tacit permission for increasingly extreme leftist positions to be espoused by his supporters. At the same time, the media showed its true ideological position, becoming what has been called a "Democratic Superpac." The Democratic party has careened leftward, and now offers us  a crypto-communist as presidential front runner (that may change soon).

Noonan writes:

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits. We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.

This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.

Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. They don’t know what they’re grinding down.

They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

In my last post I wrote about the growing narrative espoused by Obama and his supporters when they encounter less "give" than they expect—"It's not who where are." But the "we" in that sentence should include the half of the country that doesn't agree with the Left.

I suspect that as the months pass, the Left will learn the limits of "give." But then again, maybe not.