You still don’t understand the Supreme Court

The ongoing left-wing furor over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee — 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch, who currently serves as a judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals — is absurd on a number of levels, but it is especially illustrative of progressives’ fundamental misunderstanding of the Court’s role and function. The Left has a love-hate relationship with judicial activism. Though Democrats wholeheartedly embrace and enforce the idea of a “living Constitution” when it enables the Court to mysteriously discover rights to abortion and same-sex marriage, they become incensed when they fear that a similar activist jurisprudence might be used to reach conclusions they dislike. Enter Neil Gorsuch. Because progressives have so deeply bought into the notion that the members of the Court are, in essence, nine representatives of the people put in place for life, it becomes imperative for them to keep that unlimited legislative power in their control. Now that Trump is poised to replace one so-called “conservative” justice — the late Antonin Scalia — with another “conservative,” their panic is nearly uncontrollable.