When He Nominated Harriet Miers for the Court:
When
Antonin Scalia was named by President Ronald Reagan to fill a vacancy
on the Supreme Court in 1986, the Senate considered the nomination for
85 days*, then voted to confirm him. The tally was 98-0.
That
unanimity was by no means a measure of widespread agreement with
Justice Scalia’s judicial philosophy. Rather it was the Senate’s
customary acknowledgment -- at least until recently — that the president
had fulfilled his constitutional duty and selected a clearly qualified
person for the post.
Not so fast...
don't they remember Harriet? Should she have been confirmed to Sanda Day O'Connors' seat, out of polite respect for the president's politically correct choosing? Is Harriet not a woman?
Again,
the New York Times Editorial Board plays with facts -- and cites the dangers to the typical vulnerable crew of society victims they love to trot out when it serves their needs: women in need of abortions, illegal immigrants who have broken no other laws while residing here, executives who can't get it done under the balanced rules of the game, who go rogue on the "executive actions".
A tie vote upholds the court ruling below and sets no precedent; it is
as though the justices never heard the case in the first place. But this
would do more than prolong uncertainty; it could, in some cases,
perpetuate harm for great numbers of people -- women who have been
grievously hurt by proliferating abortion restrictions at the state
level, which have been challenged in the court; law-abiding immigrants
Mr. Obama has tried to protect from deportation by reforming enforcement
policies.
The truth is: the American people should have a say on who sits on the Court via their own votes. Not directly, but indirectly. We choose the president who chooses the nominee, and we choose the Senators who confirm, or do not. We're at a precipice ... just like we were before Ted Kennedy died, and the Congress turned, and the Dems maneuvered outrageously to pass the Affordable Care Act over the will of our elected reps, with a lot of backroom armbending and special promises behind closed doors. Like the
Cornhusker kickback, remember that one?
Remember that the Senate only had 59 votes to pass the Reconciliation
Act since Republican Scott Brown replaced Democrat Ted Kennedy.
Therefore in order to pass the Act Senate Democrats decided to change
the rules. They declared that they could use the “Reconciliation Rule
(this is a different “reconciliation” than the House bill). This rule
was only supposed to be used for budget item approvals so that such
items could be passed with only 51 votes in the Senate, not the usual
60. Reconciliation was never intended to be used for legislation of the
magnitude of Obamacare. But that didn’t stop them.
So both of the “Acts” were able to pass both houses of Congress and
sent to President Obama for his signature without a single Republican
vote in favor of the legislation. The American system of governance was
shafted. To quote Democrat Rep. Alcee Hastings of the House Rules
Committee during the bill process: “We’re making up the rules as we go
along.”
It would do the country a grave disservice to once again try and achieve via political trickery what the country rejects. We don't want identity-group candidates, we want the best qualified. Even if he is a despised "white man", like Scalia was...
Look, everyone knows the country is divided, and Barack Obama's previous promises to bring together red voters in blue states, and blue voters in red states were D.O.A. once he took office.
We all remember, before the young black men began challenging the police and dropping dead in the streets, how he sided against the police with
elite law professor Henry Gates, who refused to provide identification when police were called about a black man "breaking into" a home, which was true: Gates was returning home after a vacation absence, found the door allegedly jammed, and was indeed forcing his way inside...
In my neighborhood, we would have thanked that neighbor, for being alert and watching our house while we were out of town, and calling in when they thought they saw something suspicious. It wasn't his black skin; it was how he was trying to enter the house! Could have all been cleared up easily, if Mr. Gates had calmly provided identification with his home address on it, and "proven" that he was the owner, lived there, and had found himself locked out after an extended trip. He copped an attitude and took offense; the President took his side; and the young black people took their lead, it seems... with deadly results.
The country is divided, in so many ways now... and more and more, we are having our personal decisions mandated -- how we choose to invest our own money in our health; how we feed our children; what words and thoughts are permitted to be voiced. Of course, when many thought that the mandate to purchase a product on the private market would surely be declared unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause precedent, Chief Justice John Roberts cooked up a creative twist: despite the legislative history, he declared that the Obamacare mandate was legal because it was not a true mandate, and did not impose a "tax", but rather a penalty... There is no mandate to buy healthy insurance; there is an opt out: the IRS just intends to penalize those with minimal medical needs who incur no unpaid healthcare bills annually, and force them to share in covering the medical devices and prescription drug desires of others -- often those plenty wealthy who have disposable funds to use elsewhere on travel or luxuries.
The "little people" are being asked to pay for the expenses and errors of the banks, the businesses, the insurance and medical industries, and the huge and growing military needs of countries around the world. To share in the ill-fated choices others make on their own behalf, passing the bills off to us. We overwhelmingly reject this, as evidenced by the popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders' campaigns.
More and more, the American people realize we are just the can being kicked to finance the elite's wars, healthcare needs, social welfare programs, and religious missions, whether it be to support a "pure" religious state like Israel where the extremists gain more and more policy power or to bring democracy to all the people in the Mideast region, via our military. Not. Gonna. Work.
I have no trouble whatsoever with the choices other people make if they pay their own way. But if I don't choose something for me, why would I pay for that for you?
The best thing that could happen to America now is to turn to the balance of powers the forefathers foresaw. We are at war on multiple fronts, without the Congress ever declaring war. (Vague slogans like War on Drugs or War on Terrorism are not clearly defined missions, and thus will necessarily be lost because we're not even willing to define out specific acts that will be accomplished and when. Just keep tossing money and weapons and keep your fingers crossed that the killings of innocents stays over there, and doesn't revisit our shores, like it did while George W. Bush was busy protecting us.)
For this reason,
the President should do what he likes, but not get too upset when his nominee is not confirmed. We need to examine the records, and not feel "guilted" by the elites into seating a "son of immigrants' with two or three years judicial experience under his belt because.... "We've never had one of those on the Court before!". We're not looking for the best Hindi jurist, or the best woman candidate available to be slotted, or even looking to find a conservative replacement for Justice Scalia.
We want someone very qualified, very set and not with something still to prove: like Chief Justice Robers who seems to have paid President Obama back for that verbal swearing-in error all those years ago, by finding a "creative" solution to keeping the three-legged stool intact in Obamacare. He might have pulled if off too, if Jonathan Gruber had kept him mouth shut and not bragged on what he helped to pull over on the American people and the Roberts Court:
In November 2014, a series of videos emerged of Gruber speaking about
the ACA at different events, from 2010 to 2013, in ways that proved to
be controversial; the controversy became known in the press as "Grubergate".
Many of the videos show him talking about ways in which he felt the ACA
was misleadingly crafted or marketed in order to get the bill passed,
while in some of the videos he specifically refers to American voters as
ill-informed or "stupid". In the first, most widely-publicized video
taken at a panel discussion about the ACA at the University of Pennsylvania
in October 2013, Gruber said the bill was deliberately written "in a
tortured way" to disguise the fact that it creates a system by which
"healthy people pay in and sick people get money". He said this
obfuscation was needed due to "the stupidity of the American voter" in
ensuring the bill's passage. Gruber said the bill's inherent "lack of
transparency is a huge political advantage" in selling it.
At the same time, we had a group of self identified "
Journ-o-lists", some of whom
still work at the New York Times and have gone on to lucrative careers, who were willing to defy the neutral tenets of journalism, and meet secretly online to discuss ways to craft their stories to support the Democratic party in pushing Obamacare on the American people. It was not journalism's finest hour, especially coming in the wake of the way they helped cheer on the Bush wars, instead of skeptically asking questions and independently investigating claims...
The American people are smart not to trust, anymore.
We've been sold out by too many alread.
We want a say...
The NYT, of course, is free to opine, even meet secretly with the president and report stories the way they are told. If it earns them access, it seems, these days they are willing to make tradeoffs ethically in securing the story. (See use of words like "muscular" and "strong" in writing about the administration's plans... even today, they are not urging "diverse" candidates be included based on their personal identity characteristics to the Court, merely "strong" ones. But of course, they are.
(I don't believe that a man voted unanimously to his first judicial position only three years ago is the strongest candidate for the Supreme Court, even if his parents were Indian immigrants who worked very hard to get their son where he is today... I don't think Marco Rubio is specially qualified as president either, because of that, nor do the majority of Americans...)
But the elite, it seems only think in terms of identifty politics, and they trot out the reliable victims: women, immigrant, who allegedly would be harmed if the outgoing president is not allowed to specially stock the Court with another pick.
Why are they so afraid of listening to what the American people choose for our country?
Why do they assume, even with so much evidence piling up to the contrary, that the elite are best positioned to make national choices on behalf of the rest of us? (I don't even think they see us in "flyover country" but they sure do take our tax money for their Washington redistribution needs...)
Give the People What They Want...
Let them use their presidential votes to indicate what kind of balance we want on the Supreme Court.
The new president will take office in less than a year: that's a very short time to wait for a lifetime position, whose decisions will affect the direction of our country for decades to come.
Don't override us, again.
We're on to you now...
--------------------------
* Remember too: the Scalia confirmation took 85 days because the Senate
was concerned with elevating Wm. Rehnquist to the Chief Justice role,
and the Scalia hearings only came after that.
