It's Thursday, October 20, and Day 249 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell decided no nominee would get any Senate attention: No meetings, no hearings, no votes. It's also Day 218 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy.
Last night was the final presidential debate, one in which Donald Trump definitively proved that he is completely unfit to be president of the United States. But let's just focus on one part of it, on the part that matters here: the Supreme Court.
Asked about their overall vision for the court, Clinton and Trump diverged wildly. Clinton began by talking about what she'll focus on: "Namely, what kind of country are we going to be? What kind of opportunities will we provide for our citizens? What kind of rights will Americans have?"
Trump began by attacking a woman. "Something happened recently where Justice Ginsburg made some very inappropriate statements toward me and toward a tremendous number of people. Many, many millions of people that I represent and she was forced to apologize. And apologize she did. But these were statements that should never, ever have been made."
Then he got down to the key stuff. Or the key stuff for Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, anyway: guns and abortion. Because that's really what the Supreme Court is about in Republicanland. "The justices that I am going to appoint will be pro-life. They will have a conservative bent. They will be protecting the second amendment. They are great scholars in all cases and they're people of tremendous respect." Tremendous people who "will interpret the constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted." Because Trump and only Trump can read the minds of the founders to determine that. He sure as hell isn't going to read anything they actually wrote to try to figure out their intentions. He'll let the Heritage Foundation do that work for him.
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The rest of the SCOTUS section is a stark display between a prepared, thoughtful, informed thinker and Trump. You could see his eyes glaze over as Clinton gave a concise summation of what the gun control case, Heller, they were discussing was all about. Here's his understanding of the case:
Well the D.C. versus Heller decision was very strongly... and she was extremely angry about it. I watched. I mean, she was very, very angry when upheld. And Justice Scalia was so involved and it was a well crafted decision. But Hillary was extremely upset. Extremely angry. And people that believe in the second amendment and believe in it very strongly were very upset with what she had to say.
On abortion, Clinton was at her best, the kind of summation of the "constitutional right to a woman to make the most intimate, most difficult in many cases, decisions about her health care that one can imagine." Her reasoning was clear, her statement forceful.
Trump wouldn't even say whether he wanted Roe overturned. "Well, if that would happen, because I am pro-life and I will be appointing pro-life judges, I would think that would go back to the individual states," was his refrain. Clearly, a man who has no respect for women isn't going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about any laws affecting them.
So here's the question for those Senate Republicans who are still holding that Supreme Court seat vacant, and who may or may not be united in intending to deny Hillary Clinton a nominee: do you really want this demagogue who hasn't even bothered to study up on the basics of the American system of governance to be your president? To be picking the Supreme Court? Because that's what you're saying right now, as long as you're maintaining this blockade.