Friday, February 26, 2016

Republicans Should Want a Supreme Court Fight

Visitors outside the Supreme Court waiting to pay their 
respects to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Feb. 19. 
PHOTO: ZUMA PRESS
On Monday morning, for the first time in nearly three decades, the Supreme Court convened without Antonin Scalia. Even from the grave, however, he still makes himself felt.
At the court, his chair remains draped in black, in homage to a man who at his death was its longest serving justice.
In the Senate, his vacant Supreme Court seat offers Majority Leader Mitch McConnell an unexpected twofer: an opportunity to thump Barack Obama for his lawlessness, and to obtain some measure of redress from a Democratic Party that has never paid a price for the way it vilified Justice Scalia’s friend Robert Bork.
And amid the public hand-wringing over the incivility and nastiness of the modern Supreme Court nomination process, a famous Scalia dissent returns to cut through the fakery. If nominees are now treated in a crude and political manner, he suggests, it’s because the Supreme Court itself has asked for it.
Go back to Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987. Ever since Senate Democrats voted him down following an unprecedented campaign of smear and calumny, Washington has abided by a glaring double standard. It is alive and well in a President Obama (a former professor of constitutional law, no less!) who now scolds the Senate about its solemn duty to confirm his pick for the court but who as Sen. Obama in 2006 joined an 11th hour attempt to filibuster Samuel Alito.
Read the rest of this WSJ op-ed HERE and view a related story below:



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