The Supreme Court's days as a super-legislature are over, and Democrats aren't happy about it

On Day Two of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a number of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee appeared to be sizing themselves up for black judicial robes.

If they weren’t doing that, they were lamenting the fact that someone of their own great wisdom couldn’t sit on the Supreme Court — the highest legislature in the land, they seem to think — and rule the country from their lifetime position.

Democrats placed themselves one after another into Kavanaugh’s seat on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals to second-guess rulings, which is only natural for those who think the courts are there to make policy decisions. Ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained that Kavanaugh had, in an opinion on D.C. gun control laws, deemed that semi-automatic rifles are in “common use” and thus not, under Supreme Court definition, something the D.C. government could ban. Feinstein was weirdly outraged about this characterization, given that private citizens in the U.S. own something on the order of 50 or 60 million such rifles, and possibly more.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., complained that Kavanaugh had dissented from an emergency ruling that ended up rushing a minor migrant girl in the care of the U.S. government off to get an abortion without parental consent. Durbin also complained about Kavanaugh’s interpretation of a complicated Supreme Court case that had deemed illegal immigrant workers unable to vote in workplace unionization elections.

For Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., the problem was that Kavanaugh had written an opinion favoring two mergers in the grocery and health insurance industries.