Tucker: The barrage of ongoing change continues
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host analyzes how court-packing will affect American's trust in the institution
Things are changing fast, in case you haven’t noticed; much too fast. People can’t metabolize change at this pace — not just Fox News viewers, or elderly Republican men, but the species itself. Human beings are not designed for relentless, abrupt changes to the way they live or the way they think.
For most of human history, they didn’t have to deal with those changes because they didn’t happen much. Societies evolved slowly. Fourth-century France was very much like fourteenth-century France. For a thousand years, most people in France spent their lives following domesticated animals around the fields and living in thatched huts.
Then, in the 1700s, someone perfected the steam engine and nothing was ever the same. Life for average people began to change. It moved faster and faster, and then exponentially faster. This continued until the present day, a moment in which nearly every morning, you awake to a brand new world.
If you’re over 40, you may have trouble recognizing your own country. It’s just too unfamiliar. The self-righteous children on social media don’t care to notice this and when they do, they dismiss any complaint about change as bigotry. But it’s not bigotry. It’s human nature: Abrupt change always causes social chaos. Human beings develop customs and habits and generational expectations for a reason. It’s not random.
Continuity is comforting to people. If you eliminate familiar things overnight, societies fracture. Populations tend to explode. We’ve seen that happen. The last industrial revolution, in the end, provoked armed revolutions. Hundreds of millions of people died. Germany got Hitler. Eastern Europe got Stalinism. Yes, we did wind up with antibiotics in the end. You can thank technology for that, and we do. But we also got genocide and atomic bombs. There’s a lesson here: if you’re going to change things, go slowly. Choose the incremental over the immediate. Explain yourself as you do it. Reassure people. Acknowledge the reality of evolutionary biology.
Human beings aren’t born to be machine components. You can’t bang out improved versions of your citizens on a 3-D printer. People in real life are complicated and stubborn and hard to control. Even the most open-minded ones get jumpy and bewildered when suddenly everything’s different. You’d think this would all be obvious and that wise leaders would know it intuitively. If you’re going to have relentless technological change — and apparently we are — you can’t inflict relentless social change and expect your society to survive. Things will fall apart if you do that, guaranteed.
Yet that’s exactly what our leaders are currently doing. They’re changing everything, whether we like it or not: a new language, new values, new biology, new curricula, new social mores and hiring standards and body types. A brand new national population. And then, because that’s still not enough change, a whole new system of government. All of that in three months.
What will the consequences of that revolution be? In your bones, you know the answer. It’s terrifying. And it doesn’t have to happen. What America needs more than anything is a pause, a moment to catch our national breath. Take stock. Assess what just happened — a lot — and calmly consider the best way forward. You want unity for the country? We all do. That might bring us unity. But no. The kaleidoscopic barrage of unending change continues.
On Thursday, Democrats informed us, they plan to dismantle the last trusted branch of our government, the Supreme Court. A Congressman from New York explained why they’re doing it. His name is Mondaire Jones. He’s 33 years old. He went to Stanford and Harvard Law School, meaning that in his short life, he’s produced essentially nothing. None of it is real to him. So he’s happy to blow it up.
MONDAIRE JONES CAMPAIGN AD: Our democracy is in crisis. The insurrection on January 6th made that clear. This crisis didn’t arrive overnight or by accident. The Supreme Court helped bring us here. In fact, the Court has been actively dismantling our democracy for years … It gutted the protections of the Voting Rights Act and paved the way for a new era of racist voter suppression. It helped install Donald Trump in the White House and he returned the favor by appointing more justices who are hostile to our democracy … We the people can break the far right, anti-democratic grip on our democracy. We can expand the Supreme Court. And together we can finally restore government by the people instead of government by the powerful.
The Supreme Court did the insurrection of January 6th. The QAnon Court, if you will. Bet you didn’t know that. Mondaire Jones didn’t know it either. He’s just reading what they wrote for him on the card.
Who is "they" by the way? That was a slick campaign ad. He didn’t make it in his basement. It cost money to make the ad. Where’d that money coming from? We’d love to know. Was it funded by some of the big corporations that have just finished telling us that asking people to show ID when they vote is Jim Crow racism?
LAWRENCE JONES: DEMOCRATS PUSH HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF THE SUPREME COURT, 'HAS THE PARTY LOST ITS MIND?'
It's possible. "Tucker Carlson Tonight" called around Thursday to find out. We asked Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey, Delta CEO Ed Bastian, longtime Amazon head Jeff Bezos, and Merck CEO Ken Frazier. All of these business titans have been happy to weigh in with full force recently on what form of government the rest of us must have. It’s their business, it’s up to them now. What’s their view on turning our highest court into a legislative body, on making our last officially non-partisan institution into something that’s openly partisan and therefore trusted by no one? We can only guess what they think about that, because they didn’t get back to us. Apparently they’re no longer that worried about "democracy." Whatever Biden wants, just don’t take our money.
They know where Joe Biden stands. A few days ago, the White House formed something called the "Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States." The job of that commission was to assess the "principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform."
SHANNON BREAM: DEMOCRATS' COURT-PACKING PROPOSAL WOULD 'CHANGE EVERYTHING ON CAPITOL HILL'
It’s the last phrase that matters "Supreme Court reform." That’s not "court-packing," it’s not what FDR did. It’s "Supreme Court reform." The White House says it just wants to study the subject objectively. Right. The real purpose was to signal that court-packing now has the endorsement of the White House. At a press conference this afternoon, some of the most powerful Democrats in the Congress made it clear they received the message.
REP. JERRY NADLER, D-N.Y.: Some people will say we’re packing the court. We’re not packing it. We’re unpacking it. Senator McConnell and the Republicans packed the court over the last couple of years ... so this is a reaction to that.
(Props to the 23-year-old communications aide who thought of that line.
Jerry Nadler is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which kind of a big job when you’re talking about courts. But he wasn't alone this afternoon.
Hank Johnson of Georgia was there. You may remember Hank Johnson as the amateur geologist who once speculated in a committee hearing that the island nation of Guam might capsize due to overpopulation. That’s Hank Johnson, and on Thursday he offered his assessment of how big the Supreme Court should be.
HANK JOHNSON: This natural expansion [of the court] stopped after the Civil War, leaving us today with the historical oddity of 13 circuit courts of appeal and only nine justices. I believe it’s time to go back to this tradition and have at least 13 justices.
We’re going to go back to before the Civil War, says Hank Johnson. It's time to "go back to tradition." Really? You wonder what other antebellum traditions Hank Johnson wants to bring back to the United States. Sadly, he didn’t say. Until now Hank Johnson's party had us convinced that earlier American traditions were rooted in White supremacy. But somehow, not 13 members on the Supreme Court. That’s what Hank Johnson just told us.
These people are genuinely radical. The good news is, they’re also stupid. Ed Markey, who's served in Congress for forty years, stood up and repeated the same line. Only by packing the Supreme Court full of partisan Democrats, Ed Markey said, can we restore the Supreme Court's legitimacy.
ED MARKEY: And I’m disappointed to say that too many Americans question the court’s legitimacy. The consequence is that the rights of all Americans – especially people of color, women and our immigrant communities are at risk ... We have a stilted, illegitimate 6-3 majority on the court that has caused this crisis of confidence in our country.
COTTON WARNS THE SUPREME COURT 'WILL LOSE ALL LEGITIMACY' IF DEMS' PLAN TO EXPAND IT HAPPENS
It’s hard to take 74-year-old Ed Markey very seriously when he’s talking about empowering women and people of color while occupying a Senate seat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. Hey Ed Markey, why don’t you resign today and give that seat to a female or person of color? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Because you’re a liar.
The best part is the idea that people don’t think the court is legitimate, which is why we need to pack it with Democrats, all articulated while standing in front of a sign that said "EXPAND THE COURT."
Markey wanted you to forget it wasn’t that long ago he was telling us "we need nine," which meant nine justices.
Do you remember that? No, they don’t want you to remember that. That’s not the only thing they don’t want you to remember. Ed Markey would rather you forget that four years ago, he was standing in front a podium that read "WE NEED NINE," meaning nine justices.
FLASHBACK: RUTH BADER GINSBURG OPPOSED COURT-PACKING, SAID 'NINE SEEMS TO BE A GOOD NUMBER'
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last year, Ed Markey was one of many Democrats urging Republicans to respect her "dying wish."
"Mitch McConnell has steamrolled through a confirmation hearing ... going against precedent and Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish," Markey wrote on Twitter. Even from the grave, Supreme Court justices get to determine who replaces them.
But now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer useful to people like Ed Markey, so they want you to forget what she herself said about court-packing one year before she died.
RUTH BADER GINSBURG TO NPR IN 2019: I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to increase the number of judges ... If anything would make the court appear partisan, it would be that, one side saying, "When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number."
Now, at the time, it was federal law that all Democrats had to agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so Joe Biden did.
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JOE BIDEN, 2019: I would not get into court packing. We add three justices, next time around we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility that the court has at all.
We could go on, but we’re not going to. Brazen hypocrisy is starting to bore us. Yes, they’re liars with no principles who will say anything for power. Got it. Now, in real life, the bill we are talking about may not pass. But the sad thing is, it doesn’t matter whether or not it does, because the damage has already been done. People who are paid to care about the country have proven they don’t. They’d wreck the place as long as they got to control it. That’s not a reassuring message. Americans are highly anxious right now. They’re paranoid and distrustful. They don’t think any of their institutions are on the level. But instead of reassuring them everything will be OK, leading Democrats just showed them they have every reason to feel that way.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 15, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight"
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