Some people ask if there is any sort of dubious behavior that will lead Republicans to vote against confirming Brett Kavenaugh. Others complain about how warped Republicans are to put up with Trump and his corruption, dangerously erratic behavior and attempts to subvert the rule of law, all for the sake of tax cuts, regulatory rollback, and federal judges.
To which I can only answer, you don't understand economic royalists. While the number of true economic royalists in the US is small, they make up basically the entire Republican elite. From an economic royalist perspective, the US has not been free since 1933. Ever since the New Deal was implemented, we have existed under the jackboot of despotism.* Their top priority is therefore rolling back the New Deal.
This has proven problematic. They had high hopes when Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, but he was thwarted by a Democratic Congress. They had high hopes when Newt Gingrich took over Congress in 1994, but he was thwarted by a Democratic President. When Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency in 2000, they didn't make any effort whatever and even expanded the abomination by introducing Medicare-D. The last hope for economic royalists was the Tea Party, which denounced Obama deficits, fought Obamacare, and demanded massive spending cuts, even to the point of threatening a debt ceiling breach. But the American people reelected Obama and sided with him over the government shutdown and debt ceiling. And economic royalists were forced to the conclusion that the American people had become hopelessly corrupted, that they would never roll back the New Deal with the elective branches of government, and that their only hope was through the federal courts. The Federalist Society has assembled an essentially unlimited supply of economic royalist judges and the Republican elite has made no secret that they were holding their noses and voting Trump for one reason only -- federal judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular.**
Trump has not disappointed, and the reason is obvious. He neither knows nor cares anything whatever about federal judges. To Donald Trump, judges matter only insofar as they earn him plaudits. The Federalist Society has a ready-made supply of judges for Trump to appoint, and he earns regular plaudits for doing so. He can therefore be counted on to appoint economic royalist judges.
There is also the matter of tax cuts and regulatory rollback. Yes, I know it is ridiculous to applaud tax cuts and be outraged by the deficits that result, but Republicans have been playing this game since Ronald Reagan's day. To an economic royalist, taxes and deficits are unrelated. Cutting taxes doesn't increase deficits, it merely returns money to the people who earned it. The fact that deficits go up just shows that the tax cuts should have been accompanied by spending cuts, but can never call tax cuts into question. Besides, eventually one of two things will happen. Either the tax cuts will precipitate a fiscal crisis and force some future government to cut spending, or else there will finally be enough economic royalist judges to to declare all that spending unconstitutional. Of course, no current office holder wants to still be in office when that happens.
And then, of course, there is regulatory rollback. The Trump administration is declining to enforce regulations, which is good as far as it goes, but has the disadvantage that some Democratic administration might start enforcing them again. Better, from an economic royalist perspective, is wrecking the administrative agencies by corruption and incompetence because that will prevent some future Democratic administration from being able to repair those agencies. But one loophole remains. Private citizens feeling aggrieved under some regulation may sue for enforcement. But that just emphasizes the importance of appointing economic royalist judges who will always rule against the regulation and perhaps someday hold regulatory agencies unconstitutional.
So, yes, to an economic royalist these are the truly important things. That is not to say that they like everything about the Trump Administration. But things that bother journalists may not seem so important to an economic royalist.
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*Some economic royalists may trace our loss of liberty back to the Progressive Era and the first Roosevelt's measures such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. A few may even see the rot as setting in with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. But most, I think can live with these and see the New Deal and when we lost our freedom.
**Social conservatives also voted Trump in hopes that they would like his Supreme Court appointments, but I am more sympathetic In allowing the New Deal to stand, the Supreme Court is, after all, deferring to the elective branches and the will of the people. In upholding the rights of unpopular religious and political views, they are following a clear constitutional mandate. But in declaring abortion or gay marriage constitutional rights, the Supreme Court is imposing a political program nowhere mentioned in the Constitution that could not be passed by the ordinary political process. I intend to write more on this subject in the future.
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