Here we go. Over there at Breitbart is this story by Caroline May headlined: “Dems Predict GOP Cave on Scalia Replacement: ‘It’s Going to Be Deja Vu all Over Again.’”
The story begins this way:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) are already predicting Senate Republicans will back away from their initial vows to block President Obama’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Just as in 2013 when there was a huge public outcry and Sen. [Mitch] McConnell (R-KY) had to back off,” Schumer said in reference to the 2013 government shutdown, “the same will happen now. Sen. McConnell will have to back off.”
Schumer made his comments Wednesday on a conference call with reporters organized by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal activist group.
Shortly after Scalia’s death on Saturday, Republican leaders signaled they would not move on a nominee in an election year. According to Schumer, not only will Republicans cave but they are already beginning to waiver. He cited recent statements from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) as evidence.
“We’re already seeing the Republican coalition, which seemed unified the day Sen. McConnell announced his desire to prevent hearings and a vote on any nominee the president would offer, we’re seeing that coalition begin to crack: Sen. Grassley, Sen. Tillis, Sen. Johnson. And I believe that we will be able to have hearings and get a vote,” Schumer said.
“It’s going to be deja vu all over again for our friends on the other side of the aisle,” Schumer added, again recalling the 2013 shutdown.
Blumenthal, who also participated in Wednesday’s conference call, further decried the “obstructionism” but predicted that ultimately the GOP would back down.
To borrow from President Reagan: There they go again.
As someone who worked on five of Reagan’s Supreme Court nominations (Rehnquist, Scalia, Bork, Douglas Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy), not to mention as someone who wrote a book (shameless self-promotion alert: The Borking Rebellion) on the yeoman work that had to be done in a Democratic-controlled Senate to successfully confirm Reagan federal district judge Brooks Smith for a seat as a Bush 43 nominee to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, if I learned nothing else it is that the utter, bald hypocrisy of Democrats in the Senate, not mention their allies in a vast network of special interests, is never ending.
These are people who are absolutely obsessed, fanatic zealots in their pursuit of politicizing the courts. The goal, of course, being to force the latest item of the liberal agenda on Americans, whatever it might be, by court-ordered mandate. Doing so because otherwise the agenda would be rejected by the American people themselves, whether directly at the ballot box or through the election of their state or federal legislators and a governor or president who agreed with them. The name could be Ted Kennedy or Chuck Schumer or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or any number of others. But make no mistake, one and all they were (Kennedy) and are (all the rest and more) totally committed to this obsession. They will say anything, they will do anything. They will lie shamelessly, unafraid of some inevitable snippet of video surfacing that says exactly the opposite of whatever they are saying in the current moment. They simply don’t care.
Is this a test for the Senate GOP? Absolutely. If the GOP Senate goes south on the Scalia seat — effectively going south on Justice Scalia himself not to mention his vast legacy — they will lose their Senate majority at the hands of their own voters.
But far beyond this particular battle it is time, past time, for Republicans to get on the ball with a serious constitutional revival. As outlined exactly in Mark Levin’s bestseller The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Back in August of 2013 The Liberty Amendments was reviewed in this space.
I quoted from Mark’s opening chapter thusly, a perfect description of why the Left will fight so ferociously over the Scalia seat:
“Social engineering and central planning are imposed without end, since the governing masterminds, drunk with their own conceit and pomposity, have wild imaginations and infinite ideas for reshaping society and molding man’s nature in search of the ever elusive utopian paradise.”
Exactly. So of Mark’s suggested amendments, I focused on this one in my review. Directed at reining in the Supreme Court and its liberal Justices, it reads in part:
SECTION 4: Upon three-fifths vote of the House of Representatives and the Senate, Congress may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.
SECTION 5: The Congressional override under Section 4 is not subject to a Presidential veto and shall not be the subject of litigation or review in any Federal or State court.
SECTION 6: Upon three-fifths vote of the several state legislatures, the States may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.
Suffice to say, the battle over the Scalia seat will be titanic. But whether the GOP in the Senate wimps or stands tall, whether, to borrow again from Reagan, they are rabbits or tigers, it is time — way past time — to finally take action to stop this left-wing anti-constitutional social engineering in its tracks. These endless Court battles are not the way to solve the problem of a Court that harbors Justices devoted not to the Constitution but to a left-wing agenda. As the death of Justice Scalia illustrates quite vividly, the Court can be and in this particular instance is now at the mercy of one Justice’s mortality.
It is time to fix a part of the American system that is broken. It is time to constitutionally rein in the judicial branch of the government. As Justice Scalia himself once observed:
A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
Exactly.
There could be no better tribute to Justice Scalia than to finally get on with the work of, to borrow from Mark Levin, providing the “means for restoring self-government and averting societal collapse” by reining in the Supreme Court.
It’s time to get busy with the constitutional solution to restore the American Republic as it was originally intended to be.
