The recent passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is nothing less than devastating for Americans who hold sacred our precious Constitution and the liberties it protects.
As leader of the Supreme Court’s conservative wing for almost 30 years, Justice Scalia’s rulings and opinions consistently fell back on the text of the Constitution and on what the Founding Fathers intended. Liberals have long argued the idea of a “living” Constitution that must change with the times. Nobody poked holes in that school of thought more effectively than Justice Scalia. The Constitution, he insisted, means what it says, plain and simple. It never changes except by deliberate amendment.
Justice Scalia ridiculed the article of faith among liberals of a constitutional “right” for persons of the same sex to marry and the falsehood that the Second Amendment does not apply to individual citizens. Maybe that’s why so many on the Left hated Scalia with a passion. He made them look foolish time after time with nothing more than a brilliant mind and the Constitution to guide his path.
Justice Scalia made perfect sense in 2012 when he told Chris Wallace of Fox News, “I would not like to be replaced by someone who would undo everything I did.” But that is exactly what Barack Obama aims to do. Right now the nation is one justice away from a Supreme Court packed with a majority of five hard-line radical leftists. For the rest of his term, Obama will focus single-mindedly on confirming that one remaining justice necessary to wipe out Scalia’s legacy and lock in his own extremist agenda for decades to come.
The only question now is if establishment Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate will enable him to do it.
Despite the hand wringing from the liberal media, the U.S. Senate has no obligation under the Constitution to confirm any nominee that Obama might name to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Scalia’s death. Obama has every right to hand down a nominee, but the Senate is not required to hold a confirmation vote or even a hearing. In fact, it is customary for the Senate to ignore any nominee for Supreme Court justice from a President during an election year. What’s more, not since the administration of Herbert Hoover has the Senate confirmed a high court nomination received from a President with less than a year to serve. Even so, Mr. Obama is not about to let tradition get in the way of completing his promise of “fundamentally transforming” America.
Immediately following the shocking news of Justice Scalia’s passing on February 13, establishment Republican and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said all the right things about refusing to call for a vote on any nominee that Obama hands down. Other establishment Senate Republicans like Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee where confirmation hearings would be held, quickly fell in line behind McConnell. Unfortunately, the solid wall of GOP opposition to confirming Obama’s nominee quickly began to crack.
First, it was establishment Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. He says the GOP-controlled Senate should not reject out of hand consideration of confirming the Obama nominee. Next up was Senator Grassley, who wasted no time backtracking on his earlier rejection of Judiciary Committee hearings. A top aide to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid flat out predicts that, “The next step in this process will be for Senator McConnell to back down and give President Obama’s nominee a hearing and a floor vote. That’s simple reality.”
Maybe Harry Reid’s staff is on to something. After all, establishment Republicans are known to cut and run at the first sign of disapproval from the editorial writers at the New York Times or the first hint of pressure from left-wing special interest groups. Maybe it really is just a matter of time before Senate Republicans including McConnell give in to Obama’s demands. It wouldn’t be the first time that establishment Republicans betrayed conservatives on an issue as important as this.
FedUp PAC is not standing by waiting for the Senate GOP to cave in. Please go to the “No Deal with Obama Petition” (http://www.fedup.org/content/no-deal-obama-petition) to Senate Majority Leader McConnell on this website and place your signature. Holding McConnell’s feet to the fire with direct grassroots pressure is the best thing we can do right now to keep him from raising the white flag of surrender.
To say the survival of our constitutional freedoms rides on the outcome of this battle is no exaggeration. Please get involved. Please sign the Petition and communicate in any other way you can to Senator McConnell the need for him to keep his word. Please use to the utmost the First Amendment rights that Justice Antonin Scalia fought so diligently to preserve.