An Argument for Filling Ginsburg’s Seat Immediately
By *Frank Salvato
In the aftermath of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, tensions on both sides of the aisle are high. With a hotly contested General Election just weeks away, some in the pundit/activist spheres, conditioned by the acceptance of civil unrest in our urban areas, are calling for acts of violence should President Trump nominate his pick to fill the vacancy on the bench.
The problem with this, besides the obvious, is that Mr. Trump has no choice but to deliver his nomination to the Senate for confirmation unless he is to be irresponsible to the nation’s needs and the Constitution’s mandates.
In an array of tweets, several self-important personalities issued violent threats against the country should the President and the Senate actually do their constitutional duties:
“If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f-----g thing down” and “Over our dead bodies. Literally,” tweeted Reza Aslan, an Iranian-born CNN host, born-again Islamist, and author.
“F--k no. Burn it all down,” tweeted Aaron Gouveia, author of Raising Boys To Be Good Men: A Parent's Guide to Bringing Up Happy Sons in a World Filled with Toxic Masculinity and Father who defended his 5-year old son’s right to wear fingernail polish.
“We’re shutting this country down if Trump and McConnell try to ram through an appointment before the election,” tweeted Beau Willimon, a former aid to John Dean’s failed Senate bid and screenwriter who pilfered the idea for House of Cards from the British version.
“Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to SCOTUS,” tweeted Emmett Macfarlane, a Canadian professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
If you are disturbed by the level of hatred, aggression, and complete disregard to the rule of law and the US Constitution then you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the whole of America’s urban centers for the past six months.
But what both the foreign nationals and the US citizens noted above do not understand, for their constitutional illiteracy, is that there are two pressing reasons why Justice Ginsburg’s seat needs to be filled before the November election.
First and foremost, the country needs a full compliment on the US Supreme Court should there be any contest to the election results this November the likes of Bush v. Gore in 2000. A deadlocked 4-to-4 decision regarding the election of a president would send a fireball of violence into the streets of our nation, not to mention dismantle continuity of government. With our nation as divided as it is, we would almost assuredly devolve into a Second US Civil War.
But more important is that the President and the US Senate are mandated by the US Constitution to execute the workings of government. The moment a vacancy is created it is mandated that the process of filling that vacancy begin. The bad precedent that politicians have set in elongating this process is just that: bad precedent.
Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution states, in part:
“[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law...”
As you can see, nowhere in this Article, or anywhere else in the US Constitution, does it call for a period of mourning, an exception in an election year, or a hiatus due to an impending election. The US Constitution simple vests the authority and mandates its execution.
Just as when the vice president is immediately sworn in as president when a president is tragically taken from us, so too is it necessary to immediately begin the process of filling vacancies in every other constitutional branch of office and especially in the face of a critical national election. The execution of these constitutional duties is not a sign of disrespect for the recently passed, it's a mandated exercise in continuity of government, and that is government's obligation to its people.
Politicians would love to drag out the filling of Justice Ginsburg's seat on the bench for political reasons; to suit their political agendas. Activists, Marxists revolutionaries, and ideologues would relish the elongation of the process in hopes that Mr. Trump loses his re-election bid so that Biden (or Harris) might nominate someone approved by the group-think, oligarchic elite of the Marxist-Progressive Left, the cabal that controls all things Democrat.
But politics is not government. Let me say that again. Politics is not government. We all have gotten so used to mistaking political acts for acts of government that we have become accepting of the falsehood that the political parties have any legitimacy in the execution of government. We have been duped into believing that politics is government, but politics is not -- and never should have been -- a component of government.
The shrieks of the political class who threaten retribution are the sounds of ideologues threatening the US Constitution. Politics and political operatives hold no sway over the mandates of the US Constitution. And while the Sen. Schumers and Speaker Pelosis of the Left talk about a period of mourning, that mourning must happen simultaneously with the execution of government, which means the seating of a ninth US Supreme Court justice prior to a national election.
President Washington warned us in his farewell address that politics would be the ruin of the Republic. So far, his warning has been both spot on and ignored. Where some would say the enemy is inside the gates, I put it to you that the enemy is, in fact, elected to office.
* Frank Salvato is the executive partner at The CompassPoint Group, LLC. He is the host of The Underground podcast as heard on iHeart Radio, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, and anywhere podcasts are heard.
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