Mitch McConnell's un-conservative plea to the Supreme Court
Spare me the Republican pieties about the horror of activist judges legislating from the bench. These days, judicial activism in the service of conservative causes is not just acceptable — it’s openly encouraged. Witness a new Supreme Court brief from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The brief comes in a case involving Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), challenging an obscure provision of federal election law that bars candidates who lend their campaigns funds to get elected from raising more than $250,000 after the election to pay themselves back — the theory being that post-election fundraising is less about engaging in political speech and more about currying political favor.
The day before his 2018 Senate election, Cruz lent his campaign $260,000 — not because it needed the money (it had more than $2 million cash on hand) but because, he openly acknowledges, he wanted to set up a challenge to the repayment provision. Cruz argues that the law violates the First Amendment, stifling candidates’ political speech by deterring them from lending to their own campaigns.
The Federal Election Commission, defending the provision, contends that Cruz has no standing to contest it because, among other things, he created the problem himself. “Senator Cruz’s injury is self-inflicted, since he and his campaign deliberately arranged their transactions so as to create a legal barrier to full repayment of the loan,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court. In any event, she said, “the loan-repayment limit imposes at most a modest burden on the right to make and accept contributions.”
The case, to be argued Jan. 19, offers a particularly vivid illustration of the conservative mania to undo even the most inoffensive campaign finance restrictions. But the McConnell brief, authored by former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn and former Trump administration solicitor general Noel Francisco, is notable for a different and more alarming reason: There is, it seems, no argument too extreme for this crowd in their effort to reshape the law to their liking.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/30/mitch-mcconnells-un-conservative-plea-supreme-court/
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using the courts to impose laws on the nation that they can't create legislatively, or get away with legislatively. They were never really against it for themselves, of course, only claimed conservatism must oppose judicial interpretations changing with time as wrong in order to fight changes of advancing society.
The textualism and originalism they've now packed the high court with are supposedly to fight the living, evolving constitutional interpretations they oppose as baad judicial activism. Fwiw, I believe those philosophies have little intellectual validity and are mostly phony excuses to cover for enormous RW judicial activism intended to reinterpret the constitution itself, to rid it and over 200 years of interpretations of the liberalism intrinsic to western liberal democracy.
Just more something to look forward to in 2022.
