We Need A Replacement For Justice Ginsburg Before The Election
For the good of the nation, President Trump needs to immediately nominate a replacement for Justice Ginsburg and the Senate needs to approve him or her before the election.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. I have nothing nice to say about her professionally. Her 27 years on the Court were marked by near-uniform progressive judicial activism that has done tremendous harm to our nation. She was an ideologue and an internationalist with little respect for our Constitution. I think Ms. BWR’s post on Justice Ginsburg is both accurate and fair to the woman’s toxic legacy. I am not glad that Justice Ginsburg died of cancer. That is a tragedy. But I am quite relieved to see her off the Court.
Ginsburg was a woman of great perseverance and arrogance. She suffered through and survived repeated bouts of cancer beginning in 1999. She stayed on the Court long after she could have justifiably retired during the Obama administration and been assured of being replaced by a left of center judge. She justified doing so, arrogantly thinking herself irreplacable. Now, NBC is reporting that the day before she died, Ginsburg made an impassioned plea: “”My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” This woman was, to her dying moments, a progressive ideologue and not a justice concerned with faithfully adhering to the Constition.
How cosmically apropos is the timing of all this, though? Ginsburg’s demise 57 days prior to the most contested election since 1860 is not simply one more piece of wood on the conflagration that is 2020; it is an entire load of creosote-soaked logs — both flamable and toxic — added to it.
The single most important reason for nominating and approving a new member of the Court prior to the November 3, 2020 election is that we need a functioning nine-member Supreme Court in place on that date. The progressive left is openly suborning vote fraud and electoral chaos with their vote by mail schemes, all of which will be grist for their planned post-election lawfare campaign conducted by an army of lawyers. We could well see a bevy of crucial legal challenges coming out of progressive bastions where the Supreme Court will be asked to rule, much as they were asked in the “hanging chads” case of 2000 in the Gore-Bush election. An eight-member Supreme Court may well find itself divided 4 to 4 and unable to make any definitive rulings. That truly would be a recipe for chaos and war in this nation. Thus, the first and foremost reason to seat a new member of the court is wholly non-partisan on one hand, and given necessity by Democrat’s scumbag schemes on the other.
Two, there is no legitimate reason for the current President and Senate to refrain from acting prior to the election in 57 days. As Dan Mclaughlin wrote at NRO in August:
History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them. . . .
Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate. . . .
That was actual history. Barack Hussein Obama stuck his head above the parapet to give a sort of 1619 Project-style rewrite to history.
Four and a half years ago, when Republicans refused to hold a hearing or an up-or-down vote on Merrick Garland, they invented the principle that the Senate shouldn’t fill an open seat on the Supreme Court before a new president was sworn in.
Typical Obama, Obama went on to laud Ginsburg, then concluded by saying that we should honor her memory by holding her seat open until after the November election.
And that really is that all this about. Democrats are focused like a laser on not losing control of the Supreme Court prior to the election. Compare and contrast the reactions of President Trump and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Shumer, to the news of Ginsburg’s death. Trump, as he always does when he is not counterpunching, acted with class.
Chuck Shumer, even before he publicly tweeted out condolences to the Ginsburg family, tweeted a demand that no Justice be chosen prior to the election:
To Ginsburg, the seat she occupied on the Supreme Court is not a hereditary sinecure for her to pass down and her calls to override the Constitution to protect her seat are an unfortunate and fitting way for this bitter woman to end her time on earth. To Obama, he needs to stop lying to America about our history. Obama will be a central cause of our next civil war. Lastly to Barack and Chucky, the American people do have a voice right now through a duly elected Congress and President. Elections have consequences, as someone once famously noted. So, feel free to go pound sand up your collective asses.
As to how this will play out from a partisan perspective, it really is an unknown. Will filling or not filling the Supreme Court seat now provide greater motivation for one or the other party to come to the polls in November? That is a tough call, but it does not matter. Trump needs to fill the position now so stave off post election chaos. But whether all Republican Senate-critters will go along — I’m looking at you, Romney, Murkowski, Graham and Collins — is an unknown. That said, this from Fox News:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said unequivocally Friday night that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” . . .
“The Senate and the nation mourn the sudden passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the conclusion of her extraordinary American life,” McConnell said in a statement Friday.
“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise,” McConnell continued. “Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.”
McConnell added that “by contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary.”
“Once again, we will keep our promise,” he said. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
President Trump will pick, hopefully in the next week, someone from his recently released list to fill Ginsburg’s seat. He absolutely needs to, and Republicans need to uniformly support giving that person a fair hearing and vote. Let the games begin.
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