After Senate Republicans confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative jurist, to the Supreme Court, the progressive feminist writer Rebecca Traister argued in New York magazine that they are “shoring up the power of the minority in this country over its majority population, and in doing so, acting to subvert the founding promises—of democracy and representation—which have always been hollow, yet have been the notions to which that minority power has clung with dishonest reverence.”
In her estimation, Kavanaugh and his fellow GOP appointees to the Court “will likely work to dismantle workplace and collective bargaining protections, what’s left of affirmative action, abortion rights and perhaps access to birth control itself, and of course the promise of full enfranchisement—the true and most powerful tool of our theoretical democracy.”
Over at The Weekly Standard, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell echoed the notion that the fight over the lifetime nomination to the Supreme Court “shows what American politics is, at heart, about.” He wrote:
It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roev. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.
In that telling, it’s the Democrats who want to use the court as a tool to shore up the power of a minority to confer rights over the objections of a majority.