Sarah Longwell is the publisher of the small anti-Trump website known as "The Bulwark." A former board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, Longwell "married" a woman in 2013 and "had a child with her" in 2016 - the same year she became one of the original Never Trump Republican strategists.

Nowadays, she keeps pretty busy explaining to everyone why being a Never Trump Republican also means actively championing progressivism and voting for Democrats. That's not an easy sell to people with actual convictions. It's one thing to refuse to vote for Trump. It's quite another to vote for the other side.

Longwell explained it as best she could:

Actually, I might suggest an alternative description of "partisan, tribal nonsense" — Claiming that your highest commitment and most "deeply held principle" is defending "liberal democracy in America" while encouraging everyone to elect an individual who has made the delegitimizing of the Supreme Court a centerpiece of her campaign for president.

That's pretty nonsensical.

And if Longwell is looking for partisan tribalism, you can't beat an administration that routinely pulled an Andrew Jackson by openly defying rulings from that same Supreme Court simply because they disagreed.

If you're voting for that, you're doing so at the expense of the sanctity of traditional, liberal democracy in America.

Don't take it from me, though. Take it from the current president's lips. In 2021, Newsweek reported:

In 2005, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) delivered a Senate floor speech about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's doomed 1937 plan to ‘pack' the U.S. Supreme Court. FDR's plan would have permitted him to add six justices, immediately securing a pro-New Deal judicial majority. But ‘in an act of great courage, Roosevelt's own party stood up against this institutional power grab,' Biden recounted 16 years ago. ‘They did not agree with the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, but they believed that Roosevelt was wrong to seek to defy established traditions as a way of stopping that activism.

For what it's worth, that 2005 version of Joe Biden was completely correct. In the early 1930s, the U.S. Supreme Court was all that stood between the American people and a disastrous socialist imposition by the federal government. Depression-panic had driven conservatives out of the White House and Congress, and as more than one historian describing the frantic legislative process in those days put it: "Whatever Roosevelt wants, he gets." Congress was little more than a rubber stamp.

But thankfully, even though Congress lacked the moral courage to do so, communist-lite programs like the National Recovery Act were appropriately struck down by the Court as unconstitutional. It was a move that we now understand literally saved "liberal democracy in America" from the authoritarian impulse of the man in the White House.

Now, almost a century later, FDR's Democratic Party is up to their old tricks again.

If that group controls the legislative and executive branch after November's election, they will finish what FDR started - the watering down of the Court and the obliteration of an independent American judiciary as established by the Constitution.

You might call it a sort of coup.

(Something that would repulse anyone even remotely interested in "defending liberal democracy.")