Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour
President Donald J. Trump speaks with reporters outside the South Portico entrance of the White House Saturday, Sept. 19, 2020, before boarding Marine One to begin his trip to Fayetteville, N.C.
The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a driving force in U.S. history for gender and racial equality, has suddenly raised the threat of the disastrous consequences of Donald Trump’s corrupt presidency continuing to damage American democracy far into the future.
It certainly should unite voters behind Joe Biden, the stable, competent Democratic nominee capable of organizing a national plan to gain control of the still rapidly rising death toll and economic devastation from the deadly coronavirus pandemic Trump falsely pretended wasn’t a danger to the American people when he knew better.
Now immediate concerns about safely returning to some semblance of normal American life are joined by a terrible long-term threat. Before Trump can be voted out of office, he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are hellbent on adding another extreme Trump justice to the Supreme Court creating a lopsided rightwing majority that could roll back Constitutional protections and political progress for decades to come.
Preventing Trump and McConnell from jamming through the appointment in the next six weeks before the election requires finding four Republican Senators who care enough about protecting democracy to stop them. So far, only Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins have stepped forward. Throughout Trump’s presidency, Senate Republicans have been profiles in cowardice cowering under their desks fearful of challenging Trump and his ugly, racist policies.
GOP Hypocrisy
Never mind that in 2016 McConnell and every Republican Senator refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland after Justice Antonin Scalia died on Feb. 13. They called it undemocratic for a president to appoint a justice in the last year of a term without giving voters a voice in the election. Republicans crippled the Supreme Court for more than a year leaving it unable to resolve controversial cases with eight evenly divided justices until confirming Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch in April 2017.
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Many of those Republicans publicly promised to uphold the same principle by refusing to fill court vacancies to the final year of Trump’s term. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, running for re-election, made that promise repeatedly and told voters to hold him to it right up until Saturday when he reversed himself. The silence from the others is deafening. Principles schminciples.
Like Collins, other Republican Senators running for re-election trailing their Democratic challengers should worry about possibly assuring their defeat by joining the Republican effort to steal another Supreme Court seat. But even if two more principled Republicans can be found before the election, if Republicans lose the presidency and control of the Senate, many expect them to defy the voters and try to appoint Trump’s nominee in a lame-duck session of the defeated Senate.
Supreme Crisis
The court crisis we’re facing today has nothing to do with conservatism versus liberalism. The U.S. Supreme Court has had a conservative majority for a half century ever since Richard Nixon, the most criminally corrupt Republican president until Trump, appointed four conservative justices to roll back the racial and social progress of the Earl Warren court.
There’s nothing conservative about Trump, McConnell and the extreme rightwing Federalist Society attempting to destroy Americans’ basic Constitutional rights. It’s a violation of freedom of religion and democracy for a minority of Americans to impose their own religious beliefs about abortion by law upon others who hold different religious beliefs. An even more immediate threat to American health care is the extreme 5-to-3 rightwing court majority left by Ginsburg’s death that will hear arguments next month on another attempt by Trump and Republicans to destroy the health protections of Obama’s Affordable Care Act including mandatory insurance coverage for more than 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who has voted to destroy voting rights, racial integration of public schools and women’s reproductive freedom, is not remotely liberal. But Roberts has been a swing vote recently protecting the court’s reputation by stopping some of Trump’s cruelest threats including ending affordable health care for millions of Americans and deportation of “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who grew up as Americans after their parents brought them to the U.S as infants or very young children.
With Ginsburg’s absence, Roberts is no longer the court’s swing vote. The center of the court has moved much further to the extreme right with the addition of two Trump justices, Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. A third Trump appointment could end the Supreme Court’s protection of the Constitutional rights of all Americans for generations. With voting already underway in states around the country, every American voter—Democrat, Republican or independent—should demand the U.S. Senate respect their vote and allow the winner of the 2020 presidential election to fill the last-minute court vacancy with a fully vetted nominee. To do anything else will continue inflaming the angry political division of America that has existed for the last four years.
To read more Taking Liberties columns by Joel McNally, click here.
