Unhinged- the Response to Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh
It’s a story that was written long before Judge Brett Kavanaugh became President Donald Trump’s selection to fill the seat of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Monday, July 9th. In fact, all that was really needed was to fill in the actual name of the person the President selected to fill that vacancy, by those who were set to pounce on the selection regardless of who he or she might have been.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Supreme Court nominees were judged solely on their core competencies in jurisprudence, as opposed to suspicions of their political leanings, as is the case today. For instance, Justice Kennedy was approved on a bipartisan, 97-0 vote when President Reagan nominated him in 1987. Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, nominated by President Clinton, was approved on a 96-3 vote. Even more recently-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan- both appointed by President Obama, were approved by filibuster-proof, bipartisan majorities in the U.S. Senate. This all changed however when in 2013. then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) introduced the “nuclear option,” negating the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold to approve Obama-appointed federal judgeships. That precedent, created by the Democrat Majority Leader was then used by his successor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), to prevent the unreasonable and interminable stalling by Democrats who attempted to sabotage Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination, by President Trump in 2017.
With once and future nominations to the nation’s high court thus dependent upon the particular party in power, the days of Senate bipartisanship in approving Supreme Court nominees is now a thing of the past. So, it was not surprising that Democrats decided, well before the fact, that their opposition to Trump’s second appointment was set in stone, name to be added later. Their opposition, regardless of the qualifications attendant to the particular nominee, was and is based solely upon the fact that it is Donald Trump who is selecting his nominee, and nothing else. Oh, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his merry band of Trump obstructionists will pine about Roe vs Wade (1973) being immediately overturned, if and when Judge Kavanaugh joins the Supreme Court for the fall term. They will postulate about women dying from “coat-hanger abortions in back alleys,” as the direct result of Trump’s selection. They will say that Kavanaugh’s addition to the high court will bring about an end to LGBTQ rights, and other such nonsense, based upon nothing more than the fact that it is Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton, making the decision- and that is what is really behind all of the hoopla surrounding Kavanaugh’s nomination. The same thing happens each and every time that a Republican President makes such appointment, and the warning about overturning Roe vs Wade has been a staple of Democrat opposition going back to the Reagan administration in the 1980s, so there is no news there…
…except for the fact that Democrats and Republicans both know that the chances of Roe vs Wade being revisited are about as likely as Brown vs Board of Education (1954), the landmark ruling which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, being revisited. Even if the controversial Roe vs Wade decision is overturned at some point in the future, it would only return to the states regulatory power concerning abortion- hardly the recipe for mass deaths of women seeking to terminate pregnancies. The national guarantee of abortion rights, being the central issue of Roe vs Wade, is conveniently couched as “Women’s Health” endangerment by Democrats, when it is actually the health of unborn babies that is endangered by abortion-on-demand, but that is a separate discussion for another day.
Suffice to say that upcoming hearings concerning Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court will present a circus of unprecedented postulations and prevarications as Senate Democrats will do everything possible to trash the lifetime career of a United States Circuit Court of Appeals judge whose writings on jurisprudence have been widely hailed as benchmarks of opinion that have been embraced by jurists across the political spectrum. Kavanaugh’s rulings have even been widely endorsed by and incorporated into Supreme Court rulings during his tenure since his arrival in 2003. But, as Schumer would have us believe, what is a little thing like trashing the career and reputation of a dedicated jurist, when what is really at issue is the man who nominated him? Schumer even had the chutzpah to recommend to the President that he instead nominate Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice for the high court, in “the interests of national unity.” This coming from a Senate Minority Leader whose stock-in-trade is anything but national unity.
Yet, there are even objections to Kavanaugh coming from so-called Trump-supporters, who have moronically expressed their displeasure in Trump’s selection. Never mind the fact that it was Kavanaugh, along with two dozen other possible Supreme Court nominees, whose names were published on a pre-election list by then-candidate Donald Trump, for all the world to see- a first ever for a presidential candidate. Now, suddenly, so-called “purists” claiming to support this president are taking issue with Kavanaugh’s appointment, just because their particular preferences were not selected this time around. Perhaps they would do well to examine Kavanaugh’s record and the rest of Trump’s list, before opening their mouths with their eyes wide shut unless, of course, they would have preferred Hillary Clinton’s choice, instead.
Once Judge Kavanaugh has endured the salacious slander and infectious innuendo thrust upon him and his family, he will inevitably join the Supreme Court, likely before October 1st, when the court’s fall term begins. His rulings during the subsequent decades will prove to be the only mark that really matters when it comes to whether or not President Trump made a good decision by nominating him in the first place…
…and no amount of demagogy, perpetrated by the left or the right, can change that fact, despite the multitude of talking heads who think they know better than a man duly elected by his country to make this decision.
-Drew Nickell, 11 July 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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