We’ve got more primaries coming up tomorrow night, specifically in the state of Colorado. I must confess that it was only in the last couple days that I realized that incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper (D), the former mayor of Denver and governor of Colorado, stands a real chance of going down to defeat. Needless to say that would be a very big deal since incumbent senators, or at least incumbent Democratic senators, all but never have that happen.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D), who is trying to become the nominee for governor, as well as Dem Rep. Diana DeGette, might also be toast. But it’s Hickenlooper who I want to focus on here. Bennet is running against State Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose politics aren’t that distinguishable from Bennet’s; he’s challenging Bennet on the “fight” front. DeGette is being challenging by Melat Kiros, a more questionable figure. But that’s the House and it’s an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Again, I want to focus on Hickenlooper because that has more properly national implications. (To get a detailed rundown of all the races in Colorado, here’s a good piece at The Downballot.)

This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.

What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.