Among the Obama administration’s successful campaign tactics in 2012 was the “evil capitalist” label that it slung at Mitt Romney. Given Romney’s successful business record and accompanying inability to defend the morality of capitalism, the former Republican nominee was tarred and feathered as an out of touch elitist. In the confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch, the Democrats are at it again.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein initially hoped to portray the Supreme Court nominee as an opponent of women and grilled Gorsuch on the abortion issue. With no pithy sound bites to indict him, Feinstein chastised Gorsuch for managing to “avoid any specificity” in his abortion remarks. After Feinstein’s failure, New York Senator Chuck Schumer claimed in one speech that Gorsuch is “someone with a deep-seated conservative ideology” and let on that Gorsuch’s “vulnerability” was that he possesses an “anti-worker, pro-corporate record.”
Not to be outdone by her peers, Massachusetts Senator and class agitator extraordinaire Elizabeth Warren was even more explicit in a recent Boston Globe editorial so laced with anti-business vitriol that it could serve as the intro to The Communist Manifesto.
Warren explains that “recent court decisions have let giant corporations that cheated their consumers off the hook, unleashed a flood of secret money into the political process, and made it easier for businesses to abuse and discriminate against their employees.” She adds that “If he [Gorsuch] had his way, he’d make it even easier for corporations to challenge health and safety rules that prevent them from polluting our air and water, poisoning our food, undermining public safety, or cheating people out of their hard-earned savings.”
In Warren’s opinion, businesses would blithely poison, extort and even murder their customers with abandon were it not for noble government bureaucrats who reign them in. In other words, government force is what keeps entrepreneurs from violently eliminating their revenue source, and customers ought to mistrust and even despise the very people that create their gadgets and gizmos. Warren’s conspiratorial suspicions indicate that she has probably never run a business in her life and likely screens her Dunkin Donuts coffee to ensure the creamer was not swapped with ricin.
The source for this irrational hatred is the deep Marxism that animates today’s leftist intellectual establishment. Gorsuch’s originalism, says Warren, is a cover for his true desire: to aid and abet his “right wing buddies” in their quest to defraud the common man for their own benefit.
On this view, society consists of warring collectives that work to gain power in a zero-sum “class conflict.” People do not have free will and are wholly conditioned by their material conditions, say the Marxists, so it is a mistake to think that judicial theories matter as much as judicial outcomes do. Gorsuch’s judicial principles, for the left, are window dressing meant to apologize for and justify what really matters: which collective gang he wants to prevail in the societal melee.
The attempt to portray Gorsuch as a corporate pawn is more than an attack on originalism or the Republican party. It is an attack on judicial philosophy itself.