Miranda Devine: Trump poised to make his mark on the Supreme Court
Democrats who behaved appallingly during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings are now asking Donald Trump to play by their rules and wait to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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President Trump now has enough support in the Senate to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court vacancy before the election. Cue gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and more riots as the left loses its tiny collective mind.
The death of RBG, the court’s most liberal judge, on Friday, at age 87 after a long battle with cancer, should not have been a surprise.
But coming just 45 days before Trump meets Joe Biden at the polls, it will play to the President’s advantage, galvanise his voters and lure Democrats into vicious overreach.
“We’ve got the votes to confirm Justice Ginsburg’s replacement before the election,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Monday night. “They’re not going to intimidate [us]. We’re going to move forward.”
Earlier that day, at the White House, Trump met the frontrunner to fill the vacant seat, 48-year-old Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic and mother of seven, including two adopted children from Haiti and a son with Down syndrome.
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Her pro-life views horrify Democrats. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” snarled Senator Dianne Feinstein at her 2017 confirmation hearing to the Appeals Court.
Anticipating the anti-Catholic bigotry Barrett would face if nominated, former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich asks: “Are Democrats prepared to say a devout Catholic is by definition unfit to serve on the Supreme Court? If no pro-life Justice is acceptable then no faithful Catholic, Evangelical or Orthodox Jew can be considered.
“Are Democrats really prepared to alienate that many Americans?”
Trump will choose from his short list of five women by the end of the week.
Then Democrats will have to decide how monstering a female nominee will play with the prized “suburban woman” demographic.
Judging by the mouth-frothing rage that has greeted Trump’s determination to fill the vacancy, an ugly election is about to take a turn for the worse.
Hysterical RBG cultists holding vigil in Washington warned of “civil war”.
Threats to kill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flooded Twitter and dozens of police had to guard his home from angry protesters.
High profile activists issued dire threats on social media.
“If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f---king thing down,” tweeted former CNN host Reza Aslan.
“You dare try and replace her right now and there will be a war,” wrote Hollywood actor Russ Tamblyn.
“F--k no. Burn it all down,” wrote parenting guide author Aaron Gouveia.
“Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to SCOTUS,” wrote Emmett Macfarlane, an Associate Professor at Canada’s University of Waterloo.
Instead of calling for calm, Democratic leaders encouraged the histrionics.
“Let this moment radicalise you,” Democratic Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told supporters in an unhinged video.
Barack Obama declared that RBG had left “instructions” on her deathbed that Donald Trump not fill her Supreme Court slot.
Hillary Clinton urged a “fierce” response.
Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to rule out impeachment to stop Trump getting his third Supreme Court justice: “We can impeach him every day of the week for anything he does.”
Trump was unfazed. “Go ahead. I want them to do that,” he told a rally in Ohio on Monday night. “I’m the only guy in the world that could get impeached for trying to fill a seat on the Supreme Court.”
In a hyperbolic speech via teleprompter, Biden warned of “action and reaction. Anger and more anger … That’s the cycle that Republican Senators will continue to perpetuate if they go down this dangerous path … a constitutional crisis that plunges us deeper into the abyss …. irreversible damage.”
We’ll overlook his claim that “200 million people have died probably by the time I have finished this talk from complications of COVID-19”. That would be two-thirds of America.
But there’s no ignoring this laughable statement: “We can’t keep rewriting history, scrambling norms, and ignoring our cherished system of checks and balances.”
Biden probably hasn’t noticed, but the only people “rewriting history” are Democrats and their supporters — hello, statue toppling, and the race-baiting “1619 Project”.
As for scrambling norms, Democrats repeatedly say they want to stack the Supreme Court with extra activist judges. Instead of nine Supreme Court justices, as has been the norm since 1868, they want 15.
They also want to abolish the electoral college, make Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states, and divide California into three, to entrench their power indefinitely.
That’s not scrambling norms, it’s smashing them with a sledgehammer.
Democrats bypassed established norms to turn the Supreme Court into a de facto legislative arm to enact social change they couldn’t achieve through democratic means.
It was Democrats who turned judicial nominations into the Hunger Games.
Confirmations used to be based on merit. That changed when Biden became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He presided over the “Borking” of Justice Robert Bork in 1987, the “hi-tech lynching” of Justice Clarence Thomas and joined the despicable smearing of against Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist.
So, please, no lectures on “scrambling norms”.
Democrats accuse Republicans of hypocrisy for refusing to vote on Obama’s nomination in 2016 of Merrick Garland to fill a Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
But the very Democrat grandees who currently demand a delay until after the election, said the exact opposite back then.
The difference between the two situations is, unlike Obama, Trump has the mandate to do what the Constitution allows. The electorate, in its wisdom, gave Republicans the White House and a Senate majority, which increased in 2018, so the intent is unmistakeable.
Democrats are enraged that a 6-3 conservative majority for the Supreme Court will put an end to their judicial activism.
Too bad. “Fill that seat” is the enthusiastic chant at Trump’s rallies and he is hardly one to shirk a fight.
More importantly, if the election result is contested, the Supreme Court will need its full complement of nine judges. The last thing this volatile country needs is a 4-4 deadlock in its highest court and no clear winner.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
Miranda Devine’s Apology to the Bayles Family. My apology to the Bayles family can be found on my personal Twitter account http://twitter.com/mirandadevine