“Decide what kind of country you want, gentlemen?” she said. “There is one remedy for this malignancy in our politics. You have to cut out the cancer. You have to impeach them, or they win and the Constitution dies. Do you want me to follow their lead? They gave me the power as president to censor and oppress my political opponents when they gave Hillary that power. Do you want me to use it? Should I rule by executive order? The Court says that’s fine too. If they stay, you’ve signed on to that kind of governmental power, and that’s how it will be. I will use that power. Or you can stand up for the Constitution, impeach them, and allow me to appoint justices who will stop me and every future president. But you can’t have both. You have to choose, gentlemen. We are at the fork in the road. Right leads to freedom, left leads to tyranny. So, you tell me which way we go.”
I doubt President Marlowe actually would have embraced dictatorial powers if the Senate had refused her. At least I hope not—but the temptation must be great to simply outlaw opposition to your policies, and those fools had given her that power if she wished to take it. It speaks to her character that she practically begged the Senate to strip it from her.
Thankfully, they did.
They tried the three most liberal justices for violating the basic tenets of the Constitution, and all three were impeached and removed. Two of them were literally removed—they locked themselves in their offices and security guards physically carried them, yelling and thrashing, out of the building and dumped them on the sidewalk. For the next decade the three of them would hold pathetic mock court sessions billing themselves as the “Legitimate Supreme Court,” conducting little staged hearings and issuing purported rulings that the progressive press would trumpet. Ex-justice Spitzer eventually got bored and stopped showing up—the first known instance of him choosing dignity when some other option was available—and the other two passed away soon after.
The progressives still cry about the “illegitimate coup d’état” but the Constitution, as it usually is, is quite clear. The political remedy to a Supreme Court running out of control is impeachment. Impeachment is properly difficult to accomplish, so it is rarely used, but it is there when needed. The grounds are left properly vague, so it becomes a political decision, meaning the people’s representatives make the decision and are held accountable at election time. Well, at least after the Seventeenth Amendment, it’s been the people’s representatives. Score one point in favor of the Seventeenth. Of course, it’s likely to be repealed if President Patel keeps his promise.
I was nominated and appointed to Justice Spitzer’s seat, and I did not hesitate to actively prune back the progressive, extra-constitutional jungle of laws my predecessors had rubber-stamped. I was called a “judicial activist,” and I guess I proudly wear that label. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “Judicial activism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and judicial modesty in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Here’s to Barry—the conservative Barry, of course! [The justice raises his pint.]
Chapter Six: Big Business
Contrary to the complaints of many critics within (and without) the movement, conservatism less redefined itself than reasserted itself during these years. One of the most important changes was how conservatism began to differentiate between “business” and “free enterprise,” and how it started ridding itself of the perception (and too often the reality) that it would reflexively excuse and defend even the most shamelessly corporatist of corporations.
The conservative breakup with Walmart and other giant companies that saw government as the tool of choice for lucrative contracts and to eliminate competitors marked a turning point that opened up conservatism to a second look by millions of Americans who formerly dismissed it. At the same time, the Democrats’ continued embrace of these rent-seekers became a huge propaganda target for the insurgents.
But this was only one area where conservatives made changes that both appealed to other Americans and were consistent with conservative values. Conservative support for people like the organic farmers who only wanted to sell their raw milk despite regulations pushed by the dairy industry brought in new allies, and it placed liberals in the uncomfortable position of defending the corporate-friendly status quo.
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Seventy-five years after the heyday of the hippie, Coleman is proud of his tie-dye fashion sense—and of his work with conservatives to counter the former retail juggernaut Walmart. Gesturing at a thriving mall of small shops on the outskirts of Denver, Coleman explains how conservatives’ abandonment of unprincipled allies led him to join.
This used to be a Walmart. Not anymore. Walmart found itself out of friends. I remember when the Republicans were killing themselves covering for Walmart and these other big companies—just killing themselves with working people who saw what these companies did to wages and communities. Yeah, they sold cheap stuff all right, most of it crap from China. They paid nothing for stuff from the US, so that drove down wages. For conservatives, making excuses for these companies was totally counterproductive.
See, the base for conservatives was always small business, but Walmart crushed small businesses. It was poison to the people who made conservatism work. Now, some conservatives thought of Walmart as some sort of capitalist success story, and maybe it was in its first few years. But then it grew so big that it started relying on the government to shift the playing field. It supported Obamacare to shift its workers onto Uncle Sam’s dime while crushing smaller competitors. It supported environmental regulations it could afford to comply with but that killed off competitors. It loved food stamps expansion—that meant more money for people to spend at its megastores.
The conservatives finally woke up to the fact that Walmart was just corporatism pretending to be free enterprise. And they stopped helping it.
Attacking Walmart was a huge step toward getting working folk to realize that conservatives were on the side of the little guy. Standing by us raw milk farmers, that was another. Hell, they made me a Republican. Can you believe it?
Dagny Eames (Libertarian Activist)
Walmart started out as a way to bring a vast array of goods at low prices to underserved markets, mostly outside the big cities. It did this by ruthlessly cutting costs and imposing efficiencies on itself and its suppliers. This was all great. But then it discovered that it was easier to hop in bed with the government than, you know, actually compete.
That was not so great.
This was a huge problem, and first the Obama and then the second Clinton administration just made it worse. Instead of fighting big business, they co-opted it. It was corporatism—corporatism where they publically slammed the people they were working hand in hand with.
Like so many giant businesses—General Motors, the banks—Walmart was a fraud, at least when it came to the issue of free enterprise. It wanted to be thought of as a torchbearer of capitalism to the suckers in the GOP who never met a company they didn’t like.
But Walmart and its ilk were no longer capitalist in any meaningful way—their path to success was no longer through competition and providing value but through government rent-seeking. They used their size and influence to shape the playing field so that competitors couldn’t even get off the bench, much less into the end zone.