The closest Democrats came to explaining why they opposed Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court was when they said they wanted to prevent a conservative majority on the court. That's a legitimate position as far as it goes, perhaps, but they never explained, that I heard, why that's bad except to harp on the possibility, or likelihood, that Roe v. Wade might be overturned.
They were more concerned, actually, about future cases. What cases? Well, they don't know yet. They are cases involving elements of the liberal agenda that no one knows about now, but they'll tell us when they find out. They are the "liberties" that Justice Scalia referred to in his dissent in Casey (1992) when he wrote, If, indeed, the "liberties" protected by the Constitution
are, as the Court says, undefined and unbounded, then the people
should demonstrate, to protest that we do not implement their values
instead of ours. (See longer excerpt here.)
It is these "undefined and unbounded" liberties that are endangered by a conservative majority because conservatives believe that the Constitution should have a constant meaning under the judicial philosophy of originalism whereby the Constitution is interpreted according to the meaning of the words as understood at the time of adoption. Originalism is anathema to liberals because it opposes the "living Constitution" approach to Constitutional interpretation through which they've achieved their goals in social issues for decades now. Their fear is that the party is now over.
And good riddance. It is the "living Constitution" that accounts, as Scalia explained so well, for the existential battles that take place with each new Supreme Court nomination, especially when the so-called "balance" on the court is endangered as it is now. We're constantly being subject to hand-wringing about the strife we endure with nominations and what can be done about it. Well, this is the answer: Liberals should give up on the their project of achieving their goals through the courts. If they do that, the Supreme Court can get back to its job, as Scalia put it, of essentially lawyers' work
up here, and Supreme Court nominations can get back, as they once were, to the boring job of evaluating nominees solely on their qualifications as judges and not social engineers.
