Democrats hate democracy — unless they get their way
The Democratic Party is a case study in untenable contradictions.
Its collective reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which confirmed a state's right to ban transgender treatments for kids, exemplified the party's self-righteous brand of incoherence.
In 2023, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the legislature's Bill 1 — forbidding medical practitioners in the Volunteer State from using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgical interventions to treat minors suffering from gender dysphoria — into law.
It was a popular, commonsense measure that state lawmakers passed overwhelmingly: The vote was 26 to 6 in Tennessee's Senate and 77 to 16 in its House of Representatives.
And it was right in line with national polling on the topic.
One national poll found that 68% percent of Americans oppose the use of puberty blockers in children under age 14, and a 2024 survey suggested that 59% of the country — including 36% of Democrats — support a blanket ban, like Tennessee's, on all gender treatments for minors.
But that didn't stop the left from going to great lengths to try to keep Tennessee, and 26 other states, from protecting their youngest and most vulnerable residents.
The attempt to do so was equal parts farcical and sinister: The Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that these mostly uncontroversial bills constituted a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.
Does any part of the US Constitution forbid the American people from using the democratic process to legislate out of existence experimental, medically unnecessary treatments on children?
Obviously not, as the Supreme Court recognized last week.
Yet the reaction to its acknowledgment has been predictably over-the-top.
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'Today the Supreme Court chose to cast transgender children in the shadows,' bellowed New Jersey Sen. and self-styled Spartacus Cory Booker.
'Trans kids suffer when they don't get medically necessary care. This is a brazen political decision by the Supreme Court,' insisted Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
'This is about health care,' asserted Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who accused 'politicians and judges' of 'stepping into the doctor's office and usurping the decision-making that should be left to families and doctors.'
All this from the 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' party — the same one that warned us President Donald Trump's re-election would mean the end of self-government itself.
Apparently, Democrats' faith in the wisdom of the people can be shattered by a democratic outcome they don't like.
This wasn't the first time Democrats have revealed themselves to be authoritarian hypocrites.
Recall that they fought tooth and nail for decades to defend the preposterous precedent set by Roe v. Wade, which blocked Americans from deciding for themselves, through their elected representatives, whether and at what point to regulate abortion.
Mere moments after the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs ruling returned this question to the people where it belonged, then-President Joe Biden rushed to the nearest microphone to accuse the justices of casting 'a dark shadow over a large swath of the land.'
This anti-democratic panic persists to this very day, though the judiciary is rightly and repeatedly rejecting it.
On Thursday, for example, SCOTUS rebuffed a progressive bid to force red states to give taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood via Medicaid — a lawsuit that attempted to overturn an executive order issued by South Carolina's democratically elected Gov. Henry McMaster.
Recall also that any and every effort to disempower the sprawling, unelected administrative state is met with ear-piercing, teeth-gnashing hysterics.
After the court last year ended the absurdity of Chevron deference — the frankly lawless principle that courts must defer to administrative agencies' interpretation of the law — congressional Democrats threw a fit.
'Many Americans are taught in civics classes that Congress passes a law and that's it,' asserted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
'But the reality is that any major legislation enacted must also be implemented and enforced by the dedicated, nonpartisan experts at our public agencies.'
'By overturning Chevron, this Supreme Court has undermined the regulatory system our country rests on,' wailed Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono.
But of course! How could anyone forget about the Constitution's fourth branch of government, 'experts at our public agencies'?
Surprise, surprise: All the leftist bluster about America's sacred democratic system was a political messaging strategy, a mere marketing ploy — not a true commitment to honoring the will of the people.
Democrats expect the most unpopular, radical elements of their agenda to be read into the Constitution as 'rights,' and the left-leaning DC bureaucracy to be enshrined as a decidedly undemocratic super-legislature.
While they preen and posture about their reverence for democracy, their reaction to it in practice betrays a disdain for the American system — and for its people, too.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
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