Will the Lib Bubble Explode?

These days “owning the libs” seems to be a booming business. I own lots of libs.* I picked them up at a discount during the Obama years. Owning a lib is even cheaper than owning a house with Fannie Mae’s 3% down payment program during the housing bubble years. You can generally own a lib these days with as little as 1% down, because they are so easily acquired on account of their sensitivities and huge outrage promotion market. And they are easy to maintain: just flash a MAGA hat, and they’re as good as owned for another six months.

But obviously I am concerned that we may have a lib-owning bubble—especially since all libs are sub-prime by definition­—and a crash may come. Maybe as soon as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. I hear rumors that hedge funds are heavily shorting lib ownership.

Actually, it turns out Comfortably Smug on Twitter was way ahead of me on the lib ownership bubble problem.

But if there’s going to be a “lib bubble” explosion, it won’t be because of parallels with the housing market, but because the left today lives in a bubble that is getting stretched beyond any point of sustainability. That’s the inescapable conclusion of watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week, where the lowest moment of a wholly stupid year was the view that Zina Bash was giving a white power hand signal.

I’ve been rethinking my mockery of this Krugman headline from our Week in Pictures:

Actually, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Modern liberalism depends on the idea of the “living Constitution,” which means that the written Constitution is dead. I sometimes like to quip that I’d prefer my Constitution dead on the page, thank you very much, not alive and wiggling like some kind of ugly green jello. So if Justice Kavanaugh can in fact “kill” the Constitution, it means in Krugman-speak that he will restore the Constitution as written and intended. No wonder he’s freaking out. How you gonna do all that redistributin’ if the Constitution is actually in force?

I predicted back in June that the confirmation hearings would be disrupted, which took—what? 45 seconds?—to be proven correct? Here are my next predictions:

• The Supreme Court will be disrupted this fall, perhaps on the first day of its session with newly installed Justice Kavanaugh, with leftists yelling that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are “illegitimate” justices. Someone else will have a hidden camera to post the footage online.

• If—a big if—there’s a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in our future, look for Democrats to take a run at two ideas that have already been floated: FDR-style court-packing, and/or impeachment of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Liberals have already floated court-packing, openly and without apology or embarrassment. I think some of the line of questioning by Democrats last week was an attempt to be able to argue that Kavanaugh “perjured” himself.

• Which brings me to one final comment. Democrats, I have discovered, are still hopping mad about Merrick Garland not getting on the Court. To which I usually respond with one word: “Bork.”

But the idea that Garland’s seat was “stolen” is ridiculous. If anything, it is yet one more item in the long list of Hillary Clinton’s political incompetence. It was entirely within the constitutional prerogative of the Senate majority to conclude that an open Supreme Court seat should be a general election issue. Trump openly grasped it, and his decision to release of list of potential court appointments is among the reasons he won. Meanwhile, notice that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t say whether she’d send up Merrick Garland’s name again if she won the election. She could have made Garland an effective campaign talking point, but instead she stayed silent about Garland’s treatment, and everyone understood that she thought Garland was too moderate, and that she would appoint someone younger and much more to the left than the supposedly “moderate” Garland. (NB for some other time: Garland is no “moderate.” At best, he’s Stephen Breyer.)

So win, lose, or draw in the midterm election two months off, I’m expecting libs to completely lose their minds even more than they already have. The media simply don’t have enough bubble wrap to get them through.

(* “Owning a lib” is just a variation of the old line that I think my mentor M. Stanton Evans first thought up: “I actually have the heart of a liberal. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”)