The Justice Department announced Monday night that it will not challenge a Texas district court ruling that stuck down all of Obamacare, on grounds so absurd, even conservative legal scholars won’t defend them.
The conservative movement knows that its fiscal priorities have no democratic mandate. Thus, it has decided to simply lie to the public about what its priorities are, while exploiting our nation’s civic decay and anti-majoritarian institutions, to covertly advance its ideological goals.
The conservative movement sees “the rule of law” as a rhetorical cudgel, not a binding obligation. Conservatives will declare their unconditional fealty to that concept when they need a substance-free justification for reversing a popular policy. The moment deference to existing statutes becomes an obstacle to their own ambitions, however, conservatives will abandon their commitment to lawfulness as abruptly as they ditched their principled opposition to Donald J. Trump.
For these reasons, the movement’s approach to governance is fundamentally nihilistic. If it cannot persuade the public to oppose ambitious public-sector programs through argument, it will try to do so through sabotage. After all, the more dysfunctional “big government” becomes, the stronger the case against expanding its purview may appear. And since the movement’s gerrymandering and vast propaganda apparatus have left most Republican officeholders more accountable to the paranoid delusions of Limbaugh listeners than to the material interests of their median constituents, ideological posturing takes precedence over administrative competence.
Liberals have been writing versions of this indictment for decades. And conservatives have been contesting it for just as long. But on Monday night, Donald Trump’s Justice Department effectively declared the American right’s harshest critics correct — by announcing that it believes the judiciary must declare the entirety of the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
