The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg eight days ago has opened up another power struggle in D.C. Democrats have spent decades perverting the function of the courts from that of constitutional referee into that of constitution interpreter, a role that places the Supreme Court above Congress and the presidency.
The result is rule by nine unelected officials who serve for life. Congress has gleefully passed the difficulty of legislative activity and the push and pull of debate onto the Supreme Court, trusting it to clarify anything Congress may have forgotten to write into law. Presidents have passively executed Supreme Court verdicts, and even signed legislation they believed to be unconstitutional, on the premise that the Supreme Court would make the ultimate decision.
Thus, the Court has emerged as the dominant force in American politics—and morality. Not only does the Court tell us what the Constitution really says—even if the Constitution doesn’t say it at all—it also tells us the moral judgments of the Constitution (thanks to Z Man for that insight). Thus, every cat lady and box wine auntie in America bemoans the death of RBG, their symbolic stand-in, who endorsed free and easy abortions and gay rights.
Now President Trump has the opportunity to shift the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation. But will it be enough to reverse judicial supremacy and restore constitutional order?
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It looks like President Trump will make his Supreme Court nomination pick later this week, and that Senate Republicans will deliver the votes he needs. Lindsey Graham, who is in a surprisingly tight race here in South Carolina, came out with full-throated support for confirming a nominee, even this close to the November election.
What came as a major surprise was Mitt Romney‘s willingness to vote for a Trump nominee. He did qualify his support by stating that he intends “to vote based upon [the nominee’s] qualifications,” which still leaves open the possibility of his characteristic perfidy. Even with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins demurring, that gives Senate Republicans some cushion in confirming the president’s choice.
Of course, the Left is in a full-scale, apocalyptic meltdown. They’d turned Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a symbol for their preferred style of judicial activism, and saw her as a crotchety, sleepy champion for their pet causes. Ginsburg never saw an abuse of judicial power she didn’t like, and was a guaranteed vote for the progressives on any case.
The prospect of replacing her with a constitutional conservative is the Left’s worst nightmare. RBG’s refusal to step down into a peaceful (and, surely, lucrative) retirement during the Obama administration has not cost the Democrats—potentially—a reliably Leftist seat for probably another forty years.
It’s little wonder, then, that the Democrats are pulling out every trick imaginable to stall or prevent confirmation hearings, and to otherwise scuttle Trump’s eventual nominee. That includes threats of impeachment.
With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the political world was thrown into hysterics. Democrats are threatening to set the Supreme Court building and the White House ablaze if President Trump attempts to nominate a replacement for the Notorious RBG before the November election.
Even if they were serious about their histrionic, treasonous threat, President Trump should do it, and Senate Republicans should act speedily to confirm his nominee. For that matter, President Trump should appoint the most stridently right-wing, pro-life, socially conservative, religious justice possible.
If the Kavanaugh hearings taught us anything, the Left will pillory any mildly conservative nominee to the Court. Kavanaugh is a Beltway Dudley Do-Right, and he was treated as a de facto stand-in for every unpleasant interaction a woman has ever had with a man. If the Left treated him so shabbily, why not go for broke and get the second coming of Antonin Scalia, or a young Clarence Thomas clone?
When I first heard the news, I remembered President Obama’s Merrick Garland appointment, and how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings. That was entirely constitutional, both for the president to nominate, and for the Senate to decline to confirm. McConnell’s rationale was that the Senate should not confirm a nominee during a presidential election year, so as to give the people a chance to vote for new leadership first.
My initial reaction was, “Well, screw it—just slam in a nominee and control SCOTUS for generations.” The Senate isn’t bound by an unwritten rule or custom, and the Left has broken so many rules (including threatening to impeach Trump for performing his constitutional duty to make an appointment), it’s time for us to do so to win.
But then my younger brother informed me that a confirmation at this time would not be a breach of senatorial custom. The rule that McConnell invoked in 2016 only applies when the President is one party, and the Senate is controlled by the opposing party. Presidents who have attempted nominations in those conditions during election years have failed. Ted Cruz covers it beautifully in a short YouTube video:
“29 times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year. Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times. That's what presidents do. If there's a vacancy, they make a nomination.”https://t.co/ajV3LOhtE0
Of course, McConnell warned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2009 when the Senate got rid of its requirement that sixty Senators were necessary to confirm Supreme Court nominees that it would one day come back to haunt the Democrats. The price of their political expediency could very well be—let us pray!—a conservative-controlled Court.
Sadly, it seems that the Democrats will keep moving the goal posts, as usual. The cry now is that if Trump gets his nominee before the election, the Democrats will engage in court-packing should they win the presidency and Congress; in other words, they’ll add Supreme Court seats to dilute the conservative majority.
Congress has the authority to alter the number of Supreme Court seats (when the Constitution was first ratified, the Court only had six justices, rather than the present-day nine). However, the last infamous example of court-packing—Franklin Roosevelt’s ham-fisted attempt to inflate the Court to fifteen justices from nine—was met with severe push-back from even his own party, which saw it for the transparently naked power-grab it was. Democrats nearly ninety years later are all too eager to engage in that power grab.
Therefore, even if President Trump gets his nominee confirmed before the 3 November election, it could all be undone with a Biden win and a “blue wave” seizing control of the Senate. That’s why it’s all the more imperative—especially in swing States—to get out and vote for Trump. The Supreme Court pick will be meaningless if Democrats take control of the levers of power again.
More importantly, it will—barring progressive court-packing—secure the Court for conservatives for at least a generation, and possibly beyond. If President Trump is reelected and Republicans maintain the Senate, it may then be advisable—as much as I hate to suggest it—for Justice Thomas to step down, thereby allowing Trump to appoint a younger conservative who can maintain the conservative majority for another thirty or forty years.
Big things are afoot. The Republicans and Trump may just have one last shot to save the Republic.
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Perhaps one of President Trump’s most enduring achievements has been his Supreme Court nominations. He’s managed to tip the Court, however slightly, towards the conservatives. With the death of Justice Ginsburg, Trump has the opportunity to secure a solid conservative majority on the highest court in the land for at least a generation.
With that, it looks like a good opportunity to review some posts about the Supreme Court:
“Breaking: Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court” – The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was a major shift in American politics. His confirmation hearings saw the entire fury of the Left unleashed, and it was during those hearings that I believe many of us realized that the old playbook of compromise among competing parties was no long valid or useful.
“SCOTUS D&D” – This post was a fun one—looking at the Supreme Court justices (from 2018) in terms of the Dungeons and Dragons alignments.
“Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – As noted above, the Kavanaugh hearings were a turning point. I was blown away with the number of arguments people were making on social media that boiled down to “I was raped/sexually assaulted/abused, therefore Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Dr. Blasey Ford.” The complete embrace of emotionalism and illogical thinking braced me to this stark reality.
“Screwed by SCOTUS” – One of my more recent posts on the Court, this piece explored the tendency of conservative justices to make surprisingly bad decisions in league with progressive cause du jours.
That’s it for now. Here’s hoping President Trump and Senate Republicans can get it done and slam in a super conservative appointee ahead of the election. We’ll see.
Nineteen years ago yesterday, Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger airliners, crashing them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and—thanks to the bravery of Americans aboard Flight 93—a field in Pennsylvania. 2977 Americans lost their lives that day, with another 25,000 injured in the aftermath.
I was a junior in high school when the attacks occurred. My classmates and I first heard about it during trigonometry class with our ancient math teacher, one of those public school double-dippers who was pulling a pension but still teaching (to her credit, she was a good math teacher). The psychology teacher from across the hall—a large, red-faced woman—burst into the room, blubbering, “They’ve attacked the Pentagon!”
To my shame, the class erupted in laughter. We weren’t laughing because we thought it was good news—like those Muslims partying on rooftops and those public school kids in New York cheering at the destruction. We laughed because it was so absurd (it didn’t help that a very rotund, hysterical woman shouted it hysterically). America, attacked? Who would do something so foolish? It was so beyond our comprehension, we couldn’t believe it.
As the day wore on, we realized pretty quickly that something terrible had happened. I don’t remember if we watched news footage during the day, but we were not sent home early. Indeed, we had marching band practice that afternoon. But there were real fears: would terrorists attempt an attack on the Savannah River Site, where we used to process tritium for nuclear weapons?
My dad was in Pennsylvania at the time at a work conference. Of course, Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania, and all air travel was shut down (my German teacher commented on how it was probably the first time since the rise of commercial aviation that no aircraft were in the skies). Fortunately, he was safe, and road the rails back to South Carolina. My grandparents were out in the Southwest, and rented a Toyota Camry to drive cross-country (they went on to purchase the vehicle).
In the coming days, we came to find out it was the work of radical Islamic terrorists. I recall a conversation with friends in which I suggested we ban any travel and immigration from any countries with a majority Muslim population until we got this terrorism threat worked out. It wasn’t long after that President Bush started in with the “Islam is a religion of peace” nonsense, but there was a brief, albeit very mild, nativist flare-up (when the French refused to join us in the Iraq War, restaurants changed French fries to “freedom fries” on their menus).
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Since the 2000 election’s infamous “hanging chads” and Bush v. Gore, Florida has been the quintessential swing State, the make-or-break for presidential hopefuls, and a must-win for any Republican candidate. It’s a tricky State, as it’s really three States in one.
North Florida is basically like the rest of the South: pine barrens and good ol’ boys. That’s Trump Country. Southern Florida is a melange of New York Jews and Cubans, the former of which are firmly in the Democratic fold, the latter of which historically have voted Republican, but have begun to shift blue over the last decade. Central Florida is a mix of both regions, it seems.
In the 2016 Florida GOP primary, Trump demolished the Sunshine State’s favorite son, Senator Marco Rubio by 18.68%. The general election was much closer, with Trump winning 49.02% to Secretary Clinton’s 47.82% (Libertarian goofball Gary Johnson won 2.2%, which very nearly spoiled Trump’s narrow victory)—a margin of just over 100,000 votes.
Trump’s win in Florida early on election night surely fed into the electric momentum of that historic night. While other States—think Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—have gained in importance for President Trump, Florida still remains a critical State, central to the president’s path to reelection.
Fortunately, recent polling—and some interesting nautical events—suggest that President Trump is well-positioned to a repeat victory on the peninsula. It may even be bigger this time.
As an ostensible politics blogger I’ve been quite derelict in my duty to watch the Republican National Convention, at least with the kind of rapt attention I should. I completely skipped out on the terrible Democratic National Convention, which was, by all appearances, a disaster in both form and substance.
That said, what I have seen is encouraging. The theme of the RNC seems to be that a vote for Republicans is a vote for sanity, and that the Republicans are the party of normal people. The implication, of course, is that the Democrats support insanity and the abnormal, which is objectively true.
The media has reported that the RNC is throwing out red meat for its base, but considering that Trump naturalized five immigrants and Tim Scott was calling for criminal justice and law enforcement reforms suggest otherwise. If anything, the convention this year is a sales pitch to independents, who are no-doubt weary of seeing cities burn and cops reviled.
Tim Scott is South Carolina’s junior Senator, and enjoys immense support here in the Palmetto State. His story is inspiring: the product of a single-parent household, he overcame bad grades and learned the value of hard work while working at Chick-Fil-A. He came to understand that profits don’t hurt people, but create jobs and build communities. He’s also the first black Republican Senator from the South since Reconstruction.
While I sometimes think Senator Scott is a bit hasty to take sides against law enforcement amid ginned up race controversies, his overall instincts are solidly conservative. He’s affable and easy-going, as well as eloquent and measured. It’s little wonder that he’s a rising star in the Republican Party.
Congratulations to Laura Loomer for her victory in the Florida US Congressional District 21 Republican primary last night. She’ll now face off against incumbent Democrat Lois Frankel on 3 November 2020. It’s a very blue district, but if anyone can win it, it’s Loomer. Consider donating to her campaign to flip FL-21!
Yesterday’s Rasmussen Number of the Day on Ballotpedia observed that it’s been forty years “since the last meaningful national convention.” That was a reference to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, in which incumbent President Jimmy Carter faced a convention floor challenge from Senator Teddy Kennedy. Carter had enough delegates to win the nomination outright, but Kennedy challenged the convention rules in an attempt to force a floor vote.
Looking at national polls and predictions, it’s easy to get discouraged about President Trump’s reelection prospects. Even with Joe Biden losing his mind, and the pick of a radical, authoritarian Kamala Harris as his running mate, “Sleepy Joe” is managing to stay up by hunkering down.
On our side there’s grumbling that Trump hasn’t done enough—on immigration, on law and order—and those aren’t entirely warrantless grumbles. Republicans squandered—perhaps intentionally—an opportunity to fund the construction of the border wall while they controlled both chambers of Congress. John McCain pompously and vindictively voted to keep the odious Affordable Care Act in place, a clear parting shot at Trump. Trump did not seem to offer a robust response to the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, but is now belatedly defending federal property in Portland, Oregon.
Those critiques aside, it’s worth remembering what Trump has accomplished—and he wants you to be reminded. That’s why he gave Breitbart a six-page document of his achievements. They are substantial—and make him one of the greatest presidents of the last fifty years.
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