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Why America will survive a bad election

Why America will survive a bad election

Last updated on: October 19, 2016 at 5:30 am by Gene Veith

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Why America will survive a bad election 2016-10-18T22:21:39-04:00 Gene Veith

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Ma ny Americans icans are worried that our constitutional republic won’t survive a Hillary Clinton presidency. Other Americans worry that it won’t survive Donald Trump. Still others worry that we are doomed whoever wins.

But David French points out that our Founders put together a constitutional system with so many checks and balances, so many legal limits, and so many opportunities to fix things that our nation can survive a bad election, just as it has already survived much worse. Not that America couldn’t lose its liberties. But it would take a long and arduous process to do so and would require the full complicity of the American people. “Our ship is resilient,” he says. “It would take more than one iceberg to sink.”

From David French, Hillary Clinton Won’t Destroy America | National Review:

America’s Founding Fathers . . .built a system remarkably resistant to even sustained incompetence and corruption, with checks and balances so comprehensive that when America commits enduring sin, it does so only through the consent and participation of the governed, manifested through multiple branches of government.

Let’s take the Supreme Court, for example. There is little doubt that it has slipped from the limited role envisioned by the Founders, asserting powers far greater than those granted to it by the Constitution. But if you closely examine its decisions, you’ll see the extent to which the court on its own can’t reshape American life.

Consider gun rights. One of the worst outcomes of a Clinton-appointed court would be a reversal of the Heller decision, the case recognizing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Yet the immediate real-world effect of such a reversal would be limited. Indeed, most new gun-control proposals would be entirely legal even under Heller. Its reversal wouldn’t repeal any single provision of any single state constitution, nor mandate any congressional action. It would be at worst the first step toward government persecution of gun owners, not the last — and other courts and each layer of government would subsequently have ample time and opportunity to push back.

What about abortion rights? While Roe v. Wade is an abomination on the order of Dred Scott, pro-life Americans can’t kid themselves. Even if Roe were reversed tomorrow, abortion would still be legal in the United States. The true long-term impediment to reversing Roe hasn’t been the Supreme Court but rather the indifference and even support of the American people. If a solid majority of Americans were as committed to life as most pro-life activists are, Robert Bork wouldn’t have been Borked, our judicial nominations since Roe would have been entirely different, and the decision would have long been relegated to the dustbin of history. As difficult as this is to say, Roe remains in effect through the consent and support of the American people.

Religious liberty, too, is far less legally fragile than those on the right imagine. The most critical religious-liberty decision of the entire Obama presidency wasn’t Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, a remarkably narrow case interpreting a federal statute. It was Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. the EEOC, in which a unanimous Supreme Court beat back the Obama administration’s attempt to “fundamentally transform” relations between church and state, attempting to inject the state into the very process of hiring and firing ministers. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought the government’s position was too radical to countenance in that case.

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