A Party That’s Adrift
The Republican Party doesn’t seem to understand that they’re locked into a regime-level conflict with the Democrats and their leftist base. Even with Donald Trump at the helm of the party for nearly 10 years, many GOP legislators act as if Fox News interviews, strongly worded letters, and red-meat social media posts are the summit of political action.
Republicans tend to work within the paradigm set by the Democrats and the larger left-wing milieu that includes Hollywood, the media, higher education, culture, and the arts. This was perhaps the chief reason why Donald Trump beat the supposedly strongest Republican bench of all time during the 2016 primaries, and then won a shocking election victory in the fall of 2016. Tax cuts and free market rhetoric didn’t come close to meeting the problems Republican voters saw in their own communities and in the nation at large.
Yet their political representatives seem to have learned very little in the ensuing decade. The Democrats and their handlers still control the narrative in significant ways, while Republicans all too often not only don’t bring a knife to a gunfight—they don’t even realize it’s a fight at all.
For instance, peruse the latest New York Times bombshell, which is actually another in-kind donation to the Democratic Party as the midterms draw near. Reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak argue across several pieces that the Roberts Supreme Court has been using a nefarious “shadow docket,” a term coined by law professor William Baude in a 2015 paper. Kantor and Liptak define it as “the secretive track that the Supreme Court has to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.”
The memos that were leaked to Kantor and Liptak—which The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan H. Adler suspects came from Justice Sotomayor’s chambers—involve President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which the Court quickly voted to stay with an interim order in February 2016.
It sounds scary—which is the whole point. But the framing of the piece immediately gives the game away. The Times looks to be ginning up its readers’ emotions rather than publishing a well-crafted story that gives the right context and framing.
Jack Goldsmith, certainly no fan of President Trump, points out several obvious problems with the Times piece. First off, he notes that the Supreme Court has been issuing these types of orders prior to formal argument “quite a lot” in recent years, including cases involving the death penalty, elections, abortion, and gay marriage.
Additionally, the claim that Chief Justice Roberts is some right-wing authoritarian—rather than a careful institutionalist—is head-scratching. As Goldsmith comments, this is the same person “who wrote two opinions that saved Obamacare and also voted to uphold a different Obama EPA initiative.”
And the idea that Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the infamous “mystery” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, simply gave in to Roberts’s supposed “bulldozing” on the CPP issue is unlikely in the extreme. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, Kennedy was the famed moderate swing vote who infamously sided with the Court’s liberals in striking down part of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor and in legalizing gay marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges.
In all of this, the Times seems to have taken its cues from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which pioneered these same scare tactics for decades to separate liberals from their money. The SPLC reportedly now has a hefty $822 million in assets for its efforts. (The DOJ revealed this week that they have been giving part of these funds to the very people they despise, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America, to create yet more targets for themselves.)
Instead of yet another conspiracy that points to the Right being preeminent in American life, the shadow docket story is actually about a much bigger problem with the American regime. Goldsmith rightly argues that it tracks with “the Court’s modern active engagement with presidential initiatives via interim orders.”
In a paper in the Virginia Law Review, Garrett West contends that “the causes of the shadow docket are structural: various jurisdictional and remedial rules permit lower courts to issue orders of national significance that require the Court either to intervene on the emergency docket or to abandon its supremacy over the federal courts.”
In an era where the chief executive is trying to counter the administrative state and congressional gridlock through signing executive orders and other temporary means to enact his agenda, the Supreme Court has had to step in often to preserve its supremacy over lower federal courts, which have liberally blocked such measures.
But for the New York Times, none of this matters. Rather, it’s all part of an effort to frame the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices as illegitimate. It’s not reporting, but a lengthy op-ed column dressed up in authorial yet dry language that’s supposedly aimed at exposing how Republicans and the Orange Bad Man are getting away with crushing “our democracy.”
But are Republicans anywhere close to the political masterminds of the Times’s imagination? Not even close.
This is the same party that cannot pass the SAVE Act in the Senate—a piece of legislation on an 80-20 issue that would make it mandatory to present an ID to register to vote in federal elections.
For even more evidence of the GOP’s ineffectiveness, consider the contrasting tales of what took place in Indiana and Virginia regarding congressional redistricting efforts.
In Indiana, the Republican-dominated state senate voted down a proposal that would have given the Republicans a more favorable map, potentially adding two Republican U.S. House seats.
Meanwhile, Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Virginia Democrats gave their constituency a major win as Virginia looks to cement Democratic rule in the state through a constitutional amendment that passed by a narrow margin. A state that’s currently represented by six Democrats and five Republicans in the U.S. House could shift to 10 Democrats and only one Republican—and this in a state Kamala Harris won by a little more than five and a half points in the 2024 election.
Fortunately, a circuit court has stepped in to stop the certification of the election. Though the Virginia State Supreme Court may eventually strike down the new map, Democrats show that they understand the stakes and are working to cement long-term favorable conditions.
Since being sworn into office, the “moderate” Spanberger has seemingly followed the advice of long-time Democratic campaign strategist James Carville. In a recent episode of the podcasts he co-hosts with the journalist Al Hunt, Carville said that should Democrats take both houses of Congress and the presidency, they must immediately grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico (thus giving them four more Senate seats), add four more liberal justices to the Supreme Court, and grant amnesty to all illegal aliens in the U.S.
As Carville said point-blank, “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Republicans need to understand the reality of Carville’s mantra. Though this doesn’t mean they need to mirror exactly what the Democrats are doing, they do need to internalize how the Democrats think and act accordingly.
Part of this plan must include getting Christians more involved in politics. For all the good that a rightly framed political sermon can accomplish, Christians should not confuse hearing a sermon with taking concrete political action. Attending local party meetings, going door-to-door during campaign season, making calls, putting better people into offices at all levels of government—these actions and more are necessary.
Especially after Trump exits the political arena, Christians will be needed to continue the political revolution that he began in the Republican Party. Contrary to what you may have heard, this doesn’t make an idol out of politics. Instead, a stronger Christian influence in American political life is necessary for our country to have a chance at reaching the much-discussed Golden Age.
