What a terrible price there is to pay for a judge who naively questions whether unelected bureaucrats should have the final say on what the law means.

What a terrible price there is to pay for a judge who naively questions whether unelected bureaucrats should have the final say on what the law means to the rights and livelihoods of their subjects.

Mother Jones recently sounded the alarm that Brett Kavanaugh threatens the power of unelected “agencies to implement rules and regulations, even when the statutes—often vague—do not obviously call for them, or when judges would have personally interpreted the law differently.” You see, these agencies have “expertise on the complex issues they regulate, are better positioned” than judges or lawmakers to “create workable rules.”

Kavanaugh’s radical musings suggesting that power should stem from the ballot box have not gone unanswered. But in extracting a terrible price from him, the left likely focused his attention on the urgent need for the three constitutional branches of government to rescue our republic from the dictatorship by agency.

The next time Kavanaugh sits on the bench with the girls basketball team he coaches, he will feel the questioning eyes of parents and friends from bleachers above as his reputation labors under the stench of a sexual assault allegation that amounts to his word and a friend’s against the accuser’s words reported to others decades after the fact. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a passionate advocate for bureaucratic regulation, cynically waited until the last hours of Senate consideration before releasing hearsay gossip about a letter she had strategically kept under wraps until all other dirty tactics had failed to derail President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of a man the Senate previously confirmed 57-36.

The left rejoiced at another such tactic when the viral photo from the first days of the hearing showed Kavanaugh recoiling from a strange man aggressively demanding a handshake. Didn’t he know this man was the father of a victim of gun violence? The video showed a stranger forcing himself into the judge’s space.

The picture must be viewed in the context of a day of shouting and protesting that led to his daughters being evacuated from the gallery. Kavanaugh tried to concentrate on the hearing as brave activists of the left courageously terrified his two girls.

Did he naively invite them, hoping the day would be marked with honor and grandeur? That’s what our country had a right to expect from the constitutional process of confirming an Article III justice of the Supreme Court. Instead, his face reflected unmistakable shock at the left’s grotesque assault on the essential constitutional traditions of our cherished republic.

Outside the hearing room, the left opened another front. The office of Sen. Susan Collins of Maine received “vulgar harassment calls, as well as a rape threat against one of her staffers, which has been reported to law enforcement.” As noted by Fox News, not a single Democrat has come out and condemned these tactics. The left will rue the day they bullied and smeared this honorable man during his confirmation hearing.

Thank you, leftist mob. You are molding an important vote on the Supreme Court. You made Ronald Reagan in much the same way, when, in the late 1940s, communist thugs attempting to seize control of the Screen Actors Guild gave the future president an unforgettable lesson in the ugly violence of leftist righteousness.

As described by Peter Schweizer in his book, “Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His 40-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism,” in 1946, communists within the Hollywood unions successfully engineered coordinated labor strikes to create enough chaos to seize the reins of leadership. Reagan bravely crossed a riotous picket line characterized by smashed windshields rocks thrown at the police.

One studio employee went to the hospital after acid was thrown in his face. When the police tried to break up the melee, things got even worse. As actor Kirk Douglas remembered it, “Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles and chains.” The left taught Reagan what they are truly like, just as they are teaching Kavanaugh now.

My son, just under 12 but nevertheless astute, observed that in England, they may have a ceremonial royalty headed by the queen, but the power is held by an elected government. In America, he quipped, we’re becoming the opposite. By this he meant we have a ceremonial elected president and Congress that exercise no real power over a permanent royalty of bureaucrats who hold the real power.

Our chief lawyer, the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, has proclaimed his independence from both Congress and the president. Feinstein reminded Rosenstein of his duty to the regulations of the unelected bureaucracy during his confirmation hearing, in which she demanded to know, “What is the legal justification for arbitrarily failing to issue a regulation called for under law simply because there aren’t two regulations on the book to eliminate?”

Instead of regulations requiring legal authority, the senator demanded to know how dare the elected president intrude upon regulators’ feudal empire. In the upside down world of the Rosenstein Justice Department, departmental regulations and policies trump congressional statutory and constitutional authority to ask questions and receive information about DOJ’s interference in the 2016 elections. Even the president’s demands that DOJ cooperate with Congress are ignored.

Following the tone set by his deputy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions parroted the similar declaration that he would not be influenced by “political” considerations. By this he means he is no longer accountable to the representatives of the voters, including the elected president. On the contrary, Kavanaugh is recognized as a champion of self-government who will challenge the increasingly autonomous and powerful government agencies that ignore American voters.

The power that comes with freeing government from the ballot box is the holy grail of the political class. The Kavanaugh confirmation hearing showed just how low the political class will stoop to achieve this end. Once it is achieved, men like Rosenstein guide future elections by prosecuting enemies and protecting allies.

Virtually every country in the world pretends to have elections. As recently noted by Fareed Zakaria, the world appears to be heading into a democratic recession as the bureaucrats increasingly nullify or engineer the results of elections. Just think of all the unchecked power the Department of Justice could assume if the thousands of armed FBI agents and prosecutors don’t have to bother with taking orders from impertinent presidents or respond to tiresome congressional oversight.

You don’t have to use much imagination. Rosenstein and Peter Strzok have shown the world that bureaucrats clearly believe power is too important to be given to the idiots the voters choose in their elections. We can agree with Mother Jones: Kavanaugh stands in the way of the final steps necessary to make our democracy a quaint ceremonial exercise. So we owe a debt of gratitude to the Spartacus circus performers so clearly demonstrating what will ensue if the left succeeds.