Just about the only good thing one can say regarding the American Left, and that subspecies of it called “journalism,” is that they never give up. They’ve long since abandoned any pretense to objectivity, and so day after day, they spin just about every single news event into yet another example of the horrors of the Trump administration. Indeed, they can’t even let the past go, as this editorial in the New York Times so proudly proclaims:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has had a rough couple of weeks. Yet, however many setbacks he might suffer over health care reform or other parts of the Republican agenda, he knows he has already won the biggest fight of all: the theft of a Supreme Court seat from President Obama, the installation of Justice Neil Gorsuch and the preservation of the court’s conservative majority for years to come.
“One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy,’ ” Mr. McConnell told a political gathering in Kentucky last summer.
With this audacious pledge — made only hours after news of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016, reached the public — Mr. McConnell demolished longstanding Senate tradition and denied a vote to one of the most well-qualified nominees ever: Merrick Garland, the veteran federal appellate judge Mr. Obama had chosen to replace Justice Scalia.
Boo-hoo. Like the myth of the Lost Cause that took hold in the American South after the Civil War — a noble venture brought low not by its own immorality but by fate and bad luck — the Left is now licking its old wounds and picking off the scabs from the relative safety of its last few, dwindling redoubts. Just as Lincoln and Grant admired the Confederacy’s tenacity but abhorred its principles, so do American conservatives feel about our opponents in this Cold Civil War. As I wrote on this subject six years ago in the guise of my character, the crazy lefty “David Kahane”:
The difference is that now it is no longer a battle between generations, but a civil war within a generation, yes, the good old Baby Boomers. If their parents were the Greatest Generation, what can we say of our glorious Boomer forebears? The Worst Generation slips trippingly off the tongue. The Me Generation got hung on them long ago. The Narcissistic, Irresponsible, Arrogant, and Entitled Generation is a little long. So how about this: the Viper Generation.
For sure, weren’t they like vipers in the breasts of all those schlimazels who came home from the war and promptly went about their duties to be fruitful and multiply the suburbs? And the thanks they got was the poisonous asps who lay in their cribs, played in their leafy yards, broke down the remaining social barriers that had previously kept their riff-raff folks out of the Ivy League schools, and turned on their own kith and kin with a ferocity that hasn’t been seen since Orestes whacked Clytemnestra and her boyfriend though they obviously had it coming.
As the voice of the Left, the Potemkin Village Times is obviously feeling the need to rally its troops, now pretty much confined to the coasts, the dysfunctional cities of the heartland, and scattered college towns. How else to account for this:
The problem isn’t so much Justice Gorsuch’s judicial ideology, which is so far unsurprising. Presidents choose justices who they believe will rule in a way that aligns with their own views, and right-wing groups had long ago flagged Justice Gorsuch as a reliable conservative. He would surely have been a top choice of many Republican presidents. The problem is that he’s sitting in the seat that by rights should be occupied by Judge Garland. Had Mr. Garland been confirmed, the court would have had a majority of Democratic-appointed justices for the first time in almost half a century.
Oh please. McConnell and the Senate were perfectly within their rights not to confirm Garland to the court (the president proposes, the senate disposes) or in fact not to give him a hearing at all. By continuing to claim that Garland’s seat was “stolen” by the GOP — instead of simply falling victim to good old-fashioned smashmouth politics — the whiny Left is in effect arguing for the supremacy of the White House over the Congress. As I wrote in the New York Post at the time:
The pressure to appoint him is a political campaign, orchestrated by the bully pulpit of the White House, amplified by Beltway media types. Republicans are right to resist it — and rightly argue that the confirmation of the swing vote should wait until after the election.
After all, Article 3 of the constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court, is silent on its numerical composition, and leaves the rest (including the entire federal judiciary) up to Congress. Indeed, there’s nothing in the founding document that sets the number of justices at the now-traditional nine, which dates from 1869. It’s been as low as six, and as high as 10; during the New Deal, a stymied FDR proposed raising it to 15, but Congress declined.
This transparent lame-duck electoral gambit is an offer the GOP can easily refuse. After all, while the Senate must give its “advice and consent” to significant appointments, there’s no rush and no timetable. Indeed, eight of the last 38 court nominations have failed for one reason or another and there hasn’t been a justice nominated by a Democrat president and approved by a GOP-held senate since 1895.
What’s really terrifying the Times, of course, is the prospect of a solidly conservative Supreme Court — something that could happen with the next vacancy and certainly with the next two. And when that happens, watch for the squid-ink pleas for “bipartisanship” and “balance” to emerge from the Editorial Board as it beetles around in the darkness of democracy, undermining the nation’s foundations.
But given the unrelenting hostility toward president Trump from the Left, do they really think he’s going to accommodate them? Elections have consequences, as somebody or other once said.
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