The scheme to seat this Supreme Court Justice is a plot to subvert the right of Americans to choose their next President.
Any judge or dogcatcher who would accept a Supreme Court nomination under these circumstances is exactly the kind of person who will provide payback if a contested election comes before her on the Court. The Pr*sident and McConnell are corruptly conspiring to take this election out of the People's hands and throw it to a stacked Court.
No Corrupt Bargain!
The president is corruptly conspiring to force his election out of the hands of the People and into the High Court – and is plotting with McConnell to appoint a judge he believes will decide in his favor.
No Corrupt Bargain!
Confirmation would mean two stolen seats on our High Court – Gorsuch*'s, stolen from Obama under election-year pretense; and another stolen in a new brazen act to delegitimize our institutions (plus the partisan Kavanaugh sham hearings).
“The fruit of the poisonous tree is also poisoned” is a standard of American jurisprudence. Any nominee of the President must carefully consider what this would mean for her entire disgraced term.
No Corrupt Bargain!
Senator Romney says he supports allowing the same president he voted to convict of high crimes and misdemeanors to choose the very judge who could determine the outcome of that president's reelection.
No corrupt bargain!
Senators Collins and Murkowski say they won't vote for confirmation “before the election” — but watch them vote the day after to stack the Court in favor of Trump and the Republicans just in case a litigated election needs a rubber-stamp court on their side, or agree to only vote “no” if it’s guaranteed not to affect the outcome.
No Corrupt Bargain!
America has seen Corrupt Bargains before – but never a plot of this magnitude to subvert the entire structure of our system of governance. The legitimacy of each branch of government and the dream of representative democracy are being sacrificed on a bonfire of ambitions and appetites fueled by the Trump/GOP racket.
This is a level of corruption so vast and so vile that citizens will look on their government and see little worth preserving or promoting. Our youngest will look, and see, and turn away from beliefs that have always been our only hope. What will our social studies teachers have left to teach? We are steps away from losing all.
Make no mistake – this urgency of the Republicans is not about healthcare, and not about women's equal rights, and not about the “law and order” of racial repression. Not yet.
This is their plan to subvert the election itself. It is a plan that fell in their lap. But they have planned for it, and the moment Justice Ginsburg died they rubbed their hands with glee and got to work stepping up election interference, developing plans to send the election to the Court or the House to decide (which would reelect Trump because in that case it's states, not individual representatives, that each have one vote). It is the Republican scheme to have a plot in place for all three branches of government to conspiratorially interfere in the People's sacred choice.
So, I ask that the first sentence out of our mouths in opposition to this outrage must be: This is an attempt to steal the election.
Yes it's also hypocritical; yes it also shifts the Court rightward, perhaps for generations. Yes, it also means returning to The Old Ways for women, LGBTQ+, for POC and particularly African-Americans. And so much more.
But this is about stealing the election, and this is what we must explain and organize on – and what people will most clearly understand. I believe that the clarity of this warning is the only hope to stop this wicked plot, as small as that hope may be if it requires several Republican Senators to do the right thing, and will sway less-informed voters who need this clarity and want to do what’s best for the country.
The President* and his party will do anything – anything. We must be clear: this is about stealing the election, and that's what each and every Senator will be voting on if confirmation comes prior to a new President being settled through the electoral process.
This is no longer about whether the People should have a voice in the Court's nominees before an election, or whether Republicans think only they should get Supreme Court appointments. This is not about whether Democrats would do the same thing in the same circumstance, since that couldn’t happen: we wouldn’t have a President actively trying to destabilize the election by any means possible and telling Americans that elections can’t be trusted.
This is an attempted coup d'etat in America. We can all see it happening. They want this seat because they are willing to steal the election. They are disrupting the vote at all levels — at the polls; through the mail; through targeted voter suppression; by moving polling sites to “places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant... for the sole purpose of fatiguing them,” and so much more. And now they think they’ve won the grand prize: a compliant, servile, and partisan Supreme Court to choose the President for the second time this century.
And we must stop them. Their plans are clear.
As the first Republican President told us in his House Divided speech against the Southern states’ conspiracy that was then called “the slave power,” “... when we see a lot of framed timbers, different potions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen… and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places,… we find it impossible not to believe that ...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan… .”
Lincoln tells us to simply look and see: this is a plan, a plot, a scheme — it is a conspiracy. The plot is to be ready to steal the election. If they proceed with their vote before our next President has been determined and the question is completely settled, they will have secured their final timber, and the structure to steal the election by any means necessary will be complete.
No Corrupt Bargain!
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