George Will Is The Canary In American Democracy's Coal Mine | ThinkProgress
BY IAN MILLHISER JUL 13, 2015
The Declaration of Independence proclaims that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In his latest column, conservative writer George Will boldly rejects this founding principle. In the process, he also takes sides in a battle within the Republican Party over just how much power the Supreme Court should have to strike down laws the party disapproves of. Should one of these candidates win temporary residence in the White House, moreover, the question of whether that candidate agrees with Will could have longer reaching implications than any other issue facing the voters this election.
The premise of Will’s column is that a long-overruled Supreme Court decision which drastically limited lawmakers’ ability to make law — especially when those laws were enacted to protect workers — was correctly decided and should be reinstated. Will calls upon the next Republican elected to the White House to ask their potential judicial nominees whether they agree that the Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York “correctly reflected the U.S. natural rights tradition and the Ninth and 14th amendments’ affirmation of unenumerated rights.” He also suggests that Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who recently outed himself as sympathetic to a revisionist history attractive to Lochner‘s supporters, should be that president’s first nominee.
Taken on its own, Will’s column could be dismissed as the idiosyncratic views of a man who, having been granted tenure by a major newspaper, now feels comfortable offering opinions with little or no constituency. Will’s repudiation of democracy, however, aligns him with a small but vocal movement within the conservative legal community that supports a wholesale transfer of power from the people’s representatives to conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court. Will, in other words, is speaking on behalf of an important faction within the Republican Party. And should this faction gain control of the White House and, ultimately, the Supreme Court, it could profoundly alter the nature of American government.
It is a testament to the Washington Post opinion page’s tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints — even when those viewpoints are offensive or rooted in objectively false claims — that the paper continues to publish Will’s column. Last year, Will wrote a column claiming that college women seek out the “coveted status” of being a rape victim — at one point suggesting that women who claim to have been raped are “delusional.” At the height of the panic over Ebola, Will told Fox News that the disease may “in some instances be transmitted airborne,” a claim that is simply not true. And, of course, Will is the original gangsta of climate change denial.
Will’s Lochner column is of a piece with his columns rejecting climate change and claiming that rape victimhood is a “coveted status.” Lochner is widely viewed as part of the Supreme Court’s “anti-canon,” a series of decisions that also includes the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott and the Court’s decision upholding Japanese American detention camps in Korematsu, which are taught in law schools primarily as examples of how judges should not behave. Until recently, Lochner was widely rejected by liberals and conservatives alike. Chief Justice John Roberts, who belongs to a more moderate conservative tradition than the forces seeking to reinstate Lochner, labeled the decision “discredited” in a dissenting opinion. His opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom belong to much more conservative traditions that Roberts.
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Years ago I canceled Newsweek magazine, which was fairly liberal - except for the frequent an enraging column by George Will. He became so batshit crazy, and I threatened over and over, I had to cancel magazine subscription.
And you see where they are today. 
To this day, I can't watch ABC news, since he was on the Sunday show all those years. A real face of evil, that one.
The American worker has no enumerated constitutional rights? Corporations, on the other hand...