When King Brennus of the Celts (pictured) led an army against
the fledgling Roman Republic in 390 BC, the Romans fought bravely but were ultimately
unable to defend their city against the barbarian horde. Soon six of Rome's
seven hills had fallen to the invaders, and the desperate defenders, besieged on
the Capitoline Hill, agreed to pay a ransom of 1,000 pounds of gold to save
their city. King Brennus provided a balance to measure out the thousand pounds,
but the Romans complained that he was using unfair weights. "Vae Victus!"
- the Celtic King angrily exclaimed, "Woe unto the vanquished!" as he
tossed his heavy sword belt onto the Celts' side of the scales.
"Woe
unto the vanquished!" - a phrase that will ring true to American
conservatives if we lose Tuesday's presidential election. It makes sense for
conservative ideologues to be lukewarm about Donald Trump - I need not list the
reasons. But while it is fair to criticize some of Mr. Trump's ideas, it would
be dishonest not to admit that he loves America and believes in defending many
of the principles that our Republic was founded upon. This can't be said of Hillary
Clinton - if she wins, then woe unto the vanquished! I'll devote the remainder
of this article to a summary of what conservatives can expect if our party
loses.
The
consequences of defeat can be expressed in terms of two numbers, Four and Five.
America will suffer four more years of President Obama's policies, and at least five
liberals in solid control of the Supreme Court.
Four
more years of Obama's policies may well be more than America can endure. Under
Obama, the total national debt increased by about $8 trillion, and exceed the
gross domestic product for the first time in our nation's history. Clinton will
continue the trend. Right now, politicians can get away with this by making the
Fed create artificially low interest rates on the order of 1 percent. But the
world is continually placing less and less trust in American currency. Sooner
or later, the whole rotting system will collapse, and faced with paying 3 or 4
percent interest (and making interest the largest federal budget item after
Medicare), the current financial system will collapse.
Add
to that Secretary Clinton's history of putting the interests of wealthy elites
over ordinary Americans in her trade and immigration policies, as well as her
general hostility toward American industry and business in general (except for
her friends in the finance sector). Hillary openly boasts of putting coal
miners out of business, because in Hillary's America, the only jobs that are
allowed to exist are the politically correct ones.
And
then there is four more years of the Obama foreign policy. The Islamic State
will still be around in four years, carrying out its work of death with as
little real opposition as it has faced during the last three. Meanwhile, expect
Clinton's tendency to get involved in useless wars with countries that aren't
really hostile toward America to continue.
The Russians have lost lives to ISIS
just like the Americans, and ought to be our allies in this conflict, but
the foreign policy establishment of which Clinton is a part regularly flirts with war with Russia. The cause will likely
involve President Putin's support for Bashar al Assad. Assad is a dictator, but
American opposition to his regime is nevertheless a foolish policy, as the only
other power vying for control of Syria is ISIS.
But
this is just the first four years. It is with President Clinton's other great act, appointing a fifth liberal to the Supreme Court, that she will have Americans saying "Woe
unto the vanquished" long after her own generation has gone to the dust.
Liberals
have almost controlled the Court for
the last five decades. In the early '70s, the makeup was 4-1-4: four liberals,
one conservative, and four swing voters. Liberals won nearly all the time,
since they only had to convince one of the four swing voters to take their
side. The swing voters were amenable to striking down laws that they didn't
like, at both the federal and state level, but were generally unwilling to do
anything that would totally eviscerate the other branches of government. That
is how, for example, they were able to legalize abortion by a 7 to 2 vote (with
the Court's last principled moderate, Byron White, joining conservative William
Rehnquist of Arizona in dissent), while an attempt to force the government to
fund abortion against the will of Congress failed 5 to 4, in the 1980 case Harris v. McRae.
Meanwhile,
other cases often left Rehnquist as the sole dissenter. In one of these, the Bob Jones University case, the
eight-justice majority decided that a religious institution could lose its tax-exempt
status for engaging in conduct which the government deemed discriminatory. Rehnquist's
frequent dissents earned him a new nickname: The Lone Ranger.
Under
the Reagan and first Bush administrations, things improved, but only slightly. Rehnquist
was elevated to Chief Justice, and one swing voter and one liberal were
replaced with conservatives, leading to a 3-3-3 balance in the early '90s. But
all this came crashing down when Bill Clinton replaced Byron White with Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, restoring the liberal faction to four members, where it remains
to this day. Meanwhile, swing voters still decide the balance of the court, so
its big decisions can generally go either way.
But
all this will end if Hillary Clinton appoints a fifth liberal, something which,
with Justice Scalia's seat vacant, she could do on her first day in office. The
liberal voting bloc has almost no internal variation - statistical analysis
reveals that it's more common for all four liberals to vote the same way than
for any two of the conservatives to
agree on a specific case. While Republican appointees often disappoint the
party that chose them, Democrats never do.
Here
is what the five liberals will most likely do: They will overturn Harris v. McRae and strike down the HydeAmendment, leading to full Medicare coverage of abortion. They will also get
rid of nearly all remaining abortion restrictions, such as mandatory waiting
periods and bans on late-term and partial birth abortions.
Justice
Kennedy's assurance, when legalizing
same-sex marriage, that "it must be emphasized that religions, and those who
adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate... that, by divine
precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned" will probably last
only as long as Kennedy is the swing vote. With five liberals in charge, the
Court will extend the Bob Jones
ruling to sexual orientation, so that any institution that doesn't accept the
Court's doctrine on marriage will be subject to heavy punitive taxation. This
will break the backs of religious universities, making it impossible for them (and
also perhaps religious hospitals that won't perform abortions) to continue to
exist.
That
the liberals will overturn D.C. v. Heller
and dispose of the Second Amendment is beyond question. Also note that
Secretary Clinton's litmus test for Justices is that they will vote against Citizens United, a landmark free speech
case whose central holding was that a non-profit corporation could not be
punished for showing a documentary that criticized Hillary Clinton.
Building
upon the Hyde Amendment case, the liberal Court will continue to usurp
Congress' power of the purse, deciding that more and more services (education,
health care, etc.) are fundamental human rights, and that the government must
pay for them whether Congress approves or not. They will order the bureaucrats
in the Treasury to write the checks, and the bureaucrats, being the Quislings
they are, will comply.
Most
of our country's policy is already set by judges and bureaucrats, with Congress
coming into the picture mainly at money-time. If Congress is stripped of its
power of the purse, it will become almost entirely irrelevant in our political
system. With our elected representatives entirely cut out of the picture while
liberal technocrats extend their power without end, conservatives will come to
know the truth in King Brennus' words: "Woe unto the vanquished!"
And
what of the naysayers, those who insist that Trump is just as bad as Clinton? I
have already addressed the issue of his womanizing, and do not intend to do so
again. To the complaint that his fiscal policy is fantastical, it is enough to say
that Trump is a dealmaker, and the deals he makes with Congressional leadership
will feature some sort of compromise between Trumpism and ordinary
Republican policies. In other words, they will be much better than what Hillary
and the Democrats intend to do.
Finally,
on Supreme Court nominations, some have questioned Trump's conservative
credentials and complained that he cannot be relied upon to pick judges devoted
to the Constitution. This was a legitimate argument in the primaries, but it
falls flat when his opponent is Hillary Clinton. We know exactly what kind of
judges she will choose - every Democratic nominee in the past fifty years has consistently
ruled as a liberal.
Trump
could break his promise to only nominate judges from the list of 21 conservative jurists that he recently
provided. But he probably won't. He has no reason to fight his own party's congressional
leadership to get a liberal judge onto the Court. Furthermore, history shows that Trump's promise is of the kind that generally gets kept. Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made some poor choices for the
Court, but his central promise - to appoint a woman - was upheld. Conservatives
can probably expect the same thing from Trump. He has promised to appoint from
one of the greatest lists of Constitutionalist judges ever assembled, and it
would be politically reckless for him not to do so.
But if Trump loses, then from the moment
of the fifth liberal's enthronement onwards, conservatives will have nothing
left to do but plaintively repeat King Brennus' words: "Woe unto the
vanquished!"