Democrat duplicity on lame-duck SCOTUS nominations

But will Senate Republicans fold like a cheap burka?

GOP showing signs of backing down from vow to block Obama SCOTUS pick

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That concern is justified by quotes within the above article. That Senate Judiciary head Chuck Grassley would hold hearings does not mean they will go anywhere but he had  implied that would not happen. The duplicity of Democrats (we know, it seems redundant) is pointed out in these thorough recounts of the recent history of Supreme Court nominations.  They are set forth in their entirety with permission.

First, from Gary Bauer writing at Campaign for Working Families:

A Supreme Battle

Over the course of the past year, whenever people asked who would be the next president, I often said it was hard to answer that question because the election would be determined by headlines we haven’t yet seen. We know, for example, that the headlines from the Paris and San Bernardino attacks significantly impacted Dr. Ben Carson’s standing in the polls.

The shocking death of Justice Antonin Scalia will change the presidential race yet again. It sets off what promises to be a brutal confrontation between Barack Obama and Senate Republicans.

Grassroots Republicans have zero tolerance for another cave in to this president. In fact, a surrender would be a double win for Obama. He would swing the court dramatically to the left and in the process destroy the Republican Party. That is what will happen if Republican senators do not hold firm and oppose this appointment when it is made.

Whether they want to or not, Republican senators must fight this fight. Donald Trump is so successful because many voters do see the GOP as an alternative to Obama. If Senate Republicans allow Scalia’s seat to be filled by Obama, they may as well cancel the election because the GOP would likely lose anyway. And even if it did win, the odds are overwhelming that the Obama court would negate everything that Republican president attempted to do.
The Left’s Spin

The media are already taking their talking points directly from Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and the Democratic National Committee. You will hear all kinds of remarks about unacceptable Republican obstructionism if they refuse to confirm a justice this year. We will regularly debunk the arguments being made by the left in the months ahead. But I want to address a few today.

The Kennedy “Precedent” — Many Democrats and commentators are citing the confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy in February 1988 as the precedent for what should happen now. But there are several important distinctions to consider.

First, Kennedy was nominated in 1987 after Democrats had rejected Robert Bork, an intellectual giant. Democrats not only defeated Bork, they eviscerated him and turned Supreme Court confirmations into a blood sport. They gave us a new term — to “Bork someone.” The effort was led by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden. Nothing was off limits in their efforts to destroy Bork.

A second choice to replace Bork, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew after it was reported that he had smoked marijuana many years earlier. Kennedy was Reagan’s third nominee. After stopping two nominees, Democrats thought Kennedy was someone they could take a chance on. As it turned out, they were right. Kennedy has voted repeatedly with the left on values issues.

What about their own precedent? In July of 2007 — well more than a year before George W. Bush’s term ended — Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) vowed to block any Bush nominees to the Supreme Court, declaring, “We should reverse the presumption of confirmation.”

The Constitution — There have been numerous suggestions in the past few days that the Constitution requires the president to nominate justices and the Senate is required to fill those vacancies. But during George W. Bush’s first term, Democrats waged a relentless war against his judicial nominees.

In the summer of 2001, Senator Schumer chaired a Senate hearing on the judicial confirmation process specifically to highlight the Senate’s role in vetting the ideology of judges. In other words, Schumer was laying the groundwork for rejecting judges based on their judicial philosophy.

It didn’t take long for Democrats to implement Schumer’s strategy. In 2003, he unapologetically declared, “Yes, we are blocking judges by filibuster. That is part of the hallowed process around here.” Democrats even blocked well-qualified minority candidates like Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown.

Lastly, I find it truly ironic that Senate Democrats are making this “good government” argument. Last fall, they rammed through a deal with Iran in which the constitutional responsibility of the Senate to consider treaties was completely ignored.

The White House used every ounce of power it had to make sure senators never got the opportunity to vote on the deal itself. I don’t recall any media commentary questioning why the White House and Senate Democrats were trying to guarantee that the Senate would never vote on the Iran nuclear treaty.

Obama Won — Here’s an argument you might even hear some Republicans make: Elections have consequences, and Obama won the White House so the public wants Obama to appoint judges. Well, after Obama was re-elected, Republicans won the Senate. So presumably the public wants Senate Republicans to decide whether Obama’s judges get confirmed.

Obama’s Stealth Nominee — There is a lot of speculation about who might be on Obama’s short list to nominate to the Supreme Court. Some think he might pick a candidate who is perceived to be a moderate and who was previously approved by an overwhelming vote for a lower court position.

But the process of deciding who is confirmed to the Supreme Court is a much different process. A lopsided vote in favor of a lower court appointment DOES NOT MEAN that that person should be put on the highest court in the land.

Don’t fall for the ruse that Obama will appoint a moderate. Can anyone name the last truly moderate justice appointed by a Democrat president?

This next appointment is filling the void left by a conservative giant. We are now facing a court with four lock-step liberals, two strong conservatives in Thomas and Alito, Chief Justice Roberts, who is generally good but has disappointed us on occasion, and Anthony Kennedy, who is completely unreliable.

Another Kennedy on the court would give us four liberals, two left-leaning moderates and at best three conservatives. There would be a lot of 6-to-3 decisions against our values. In short, it would be a catastrophe.

But I can just imagine the scenario now: Obama invites a handful of Senate Republicans to the White House and makes his pitch to help unite a divided country. Polling shows that the public is against “GOP obstructionism.” Weak-kneed senators conclude that they are standing tough and that this “moderate” is the best we could expect to get. But they would be buying into a disaster, substituting an Obama vote for a man who was always with us.

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From Louis DeBroux ·writing at Patriot Post:

GOP Should Follow Democrat Precedent for Once

“The Constitution is not a living organism. … It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.” —Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

News of Antonin Scalia’s death was like a kick to the gut for conservatives. Scalia long has been the anchor of the conservative wing of the court. He was a champion of “originalism” — the philosophy of interpreting the Constitution according to the intentions of the men who wrote it. His jurisprudential brilliance and his sharp wit were legendary, and even though he spent most of his career on the Court in the minority, he had more influence in the minority than his lesser colleagues had in the majority. Such was the high quality of his legal reasoning.

His loss is devastating and cannot be overstated.

His passing also throws a huge curve ball into the political circus that is the presidential election year. Constitutionally, Barack Obama is well within his powers to nominate another justice to replace Scalia, even if that nominee will inevitably be a far left-wing radical with barely disguised contempt for the Constitution as originally written. After all, it should not be surprising for a radical leftist president to nominate a radical leftist judge who shares his view that the Constitution “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country.”

At Saturday night’s GOP debate, pretty much every Republican frowned on the idea of Obama, with less than a year left in office, nominating another justice, and most said the Senate should block any Obama nominee. Predictably, Democrats are outraged at the thought of Obama not getting his choice confirmed.

What short memories they have.

First, let’s stipulate that Obama does have the power, even the duty some might argue, to nominate a replacement to the Supreme Court. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, states, “He shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the supreme Court.”

But maybe angry liberals, furious at expected GOP “obstruction,” should recall the words of a newly elected Barack Obama on Jan. 23, 2009, when at the beginning of a meeting to discuss the “stimulus” bill he arrogantly chided GOP Minority Leader Eric Cantor, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.” Considering that Republicans made historic gains in the U.S. House, Senate, and state governorships and legislatures during the 2010 and 2014 midterms, it would seem that Republicans are well within their rights to demand a Supreme Court nominee that is acceptable to them.

Democrats might also do well to note that Senator Barack Obama voted against George W. Bush nominee and now Chief Justice John Roberts — the same man who saved ObamaCare not once but twice — and filibustered Samuel Alito. In doing so, Obama declared it incumbent upon the Senate to make “an examination of a judge’s philosophy, ideology and record.” It’s worth noting that of the 16 presidents who served in the Senate, Obama is the only one who filibustered a Supreme Court nomination. What goes around comes around.

Furthermore, it was none other than soon-to-be top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who, in 2007, a full 18 months before Bush left office, gave a speech to the liberal American Constitution Society in which he said, “We should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, except in extraordinary circumstances. … They must prove by actions, not words, that they are in the mainstream rather than we have to prove that they are not.”

And then there’s the sordid history of Democrat senators like Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Obama’s own vice president, Joe Biden, engaging in vicious character assassination of conservative judicial nominees like Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Democrats are currently pleading that they confirmed Anthony Kennedy in 1988 — also an election year. But they conveniently neglect to mention why that was necessary. Bork, Ronald Reagan’s first choice for the seat, was so thoroughly pilloried and slandered that a new term — “borked” — was coined to describe the attack. Bork was defeated, leaving Reagan to choose Kennedy instead.

And Thomas referred to his confirmation process, which he narrowly passed after Democrats portrayed him as a sexual deviant, as a “high-tech lynching.”

Several 4-4 decisions now loom, leaving bad results in place for Little Sisters of the Poor, Obama’s immigration actions and forced union dues supporting political causes that workers oppose. And with a series of 5-4 opinions from the High Court in recent years deciding the scope of our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, our First Amendment rights as pertains to political speech, the legal definition of marriage (and in the process putting our freedoms of religion, speech and assembly at risk), it is absolutely imperative that Republicans hold out for a strict constructionist in the mold of Scalia.

Again, Scalia properly understood the role of the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, is to interpret cases based on a strict and literal review of the plain language of the Constitution, rather than break out their judicial electron microscopes and search for manufactured “rights” discovered in the “emanations and penumbras” of the Constitution. Scalia was unerringly true to that philosophy, even when it meant going against his own personal beliefs, as occurred when he upheld burning the American flag as protected free speech (Texas v. Johnson, 1989).

What made Scalia such a wonderful Supreme Court justice was his refusal to supplant the will of the people, as embodied in the Constitution and the laws passed by their elected representatives, with his own preferences. Though leftists see the judiciary as the ace up their sleeve — a way of enforcing their will when they can’t convince their fellow citizens of the rightness of their positions (abortion, marriage) — Scalia was a true believer that those decisions should be left to the people as expressed in the political realm.

In his speech, “Interpreting the Constitution: A View From the High Court,” Scalia made the case for leaving these decisions to the people. He challenged, “You want the death penalty? Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and enact it. You think it’s a bad idea? Persuade them the other way and repeal it. And you can change your mind. If you repeal it and find there are a lot more murders, you can put it back in. … That’s flexibility.”

Scalia was a legal giant and, though portrayed as just short of the devil by leftists, a good man who quietly lived by his principles, even when he thought no one was looking, which may be why he was able to be “best buddies” with an ideological opposite like Ruth Bader-Ginsberg. Republicans owe it to his memory, and more importantly, to the never-ending battle for the security and sanctity of the Constitution which Scalia spent nearly half a century honoring and defending, to make sure that the next Supreme Court justice shares his respect and reverence for Rule of Law.

More reading:

Obama: Who Cares if I Filibustered Alito, Republicans Have to Vote on My SCOTUS Nominee