Trump’s Supreme Court pick has a message for Congress: ‘Do your job.’
If you had to list the top five reasons for political polarization and the collapse of American confidence in American government, where would you start? Would you focus on discrete events such as the Iraq War or the Great Recession, or discrete policies such as trade or health care? Would you focus on larger cultural forces, such as the fact that we’re sorting into geographically distinct political and religious enclaves?
All of these factors matter, some a great deal, but let me suggest an underappreciated factor that belongs in that top five. For several generations, Congress — the branch of government closest to the people — has slowly but surely abdicated its role in American constitutional government even as the power of the federal government grew. The American people are increasingly divorced from an increasingly powerful national government.
Here’s the plain truth — if you live in a safe red or blue state, you may never in your entire life cast a single meaningful vote to influence the two most powerful instruments of modern governance, the presidency and the judiciary. You’re left with casting votes for the (unintentionally) weakest branch, a legislature that seems to want to do anything but the job the Founders gave it.
Enter Justice Neil Gorsuch, one-man warrior for the constitutional order.
Yesterday, Justice Gorsuch struck his latest blow against a lazy and ineffectual Congress with an opinion that began like this: “In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all.” Writing for a five-justice majority (he joined the court’s liberal wing), Justice Gorsuch declared unconstitutional a federal statute that “threatens long prison sentences” on individuals who use firearms when committing crimes “that by [their] nature, involv[e] a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”
The problem with the language was obvious, it “provides no reliable way to determine which offenses qualify as crimes of violence.” In essence, Congress simply waved its hands at a problem, went home to declare that it was tough on crime, and left the executive and the judiciary to work out the details. That’s not the way the law is supposed to work, especially when a person’s liberty is at stake.
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There is great power in Justice Gorsuch’s consistency. The ideological alignment of the decision matters not. The commitment to constitutional order is paramount. And a fundamental facet of that constitutional order is Congress’s nondelegable duty to write laws that clearly and constitutionally specify Americans’ legal obligations.
That’s a duty that Congress has shirked for decades. Thanks in large part to Justice Gorsuch, it is now being dragged back into its proper constitutional prominence — whether it likes it or not.
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The story of one man's quest to save Congress from itself. Justice Gorsuch, hero of the constitutional order, restores the intent of our founders: https://t.co/k2SXpsjmb2
— David French (@DavidAFrench) June 25, 2019
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