Stakes are high for SCOTUS pick by Don Frost

            If there’s one thing we, as a people and as a nation, learned from the Watergate scandal, it’s that when the stakes are high, anything is possible in that cesspool known as Washington politics where the ability to lie with a straight face is a prerequisite for membership in Congress.

            Now, with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we’re faced with the need to replace her on the nine-member panel. The stakes are high, very high. For that reason alone it is prudent to view with suspicion everything everyone says about replacing her. Everybody – Democrat, Republican, and independent – swears they want only fair and impartial jurists on the court.

            It’s a lie. Democrats, Republicans, and independents want SCOTUS filled with people who think and believe as they do. To achieve that end it is a small thing for politicians to tell the most outrageous lies, and that goes for every pronouncement on this subject from the White House, Congress, the overwhelmingly “liberal” news media, and the “man in the street.”

            Ginsburg’s friend, Nina Totenberg of Left-leaning National Public Radio, swears Ginsburg’s granddaughter, Clara Spera, told her that her grandmother revealed to her her dying wish: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

            If this was presented in an open court over which Ginsburg presided, Ginsburg herself would have ruled it inadmissible sentimentality on the grounds it was hearsay. None the less, the Democrats and their allies in the media continue to crow, “Ruth herself didn’t want Trump to replace her! We must respect her dying wish!”

            Conveniently forgotten is what Ginsburg said in an interview regarding Barack Obama’s election year nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court: “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”

            Which is to be believed, what Ginsburg is alleged to have said to one person and relayed through a third person or what she said openly to the world in a published interview? We know where Democrats stand on that puzzle and they’ll cling to it like a terrier shaking a rat.

            Why? Because the stakes are high, very high.

            Chuck Schumer, Democratic minority leader in the Senate, is so incensed that Trump and the Republicans might follow Ginsburg’s published advice he’s threatening to “pack the court,” with additional justices, obviously with ones prejudiced in favor of his “liberal” dogma. Happily, in his rage Schumer forgot that adding additional justices to the Supreme Court is not his personal prerogative. Congress would have a thing or two to say about it.

            It wouldn’t be the first time Democrats, irate over not getting their way, have tried to get a contrary Supreme Court to knuckle under by stuffing the court with like-minded jurists who would not shrink from legislating from the bench. President Franklin Roosevelt tried it in 1937.

            Since 1935 the court had been knocking down many of his New Deal proposals as unconstitutional. For his expanded court FDR would, of course, nominate justices who displayed a cavalier attitude toward the Constitution and were sympathetic to his Socialistic agenda. Nobody from either party doubted that.

            Luckily civility – unlike today – ruled Congress and his ploy went down in flames. Consider the court today if Roosevelt had established a precedent. Every president for the last 85 years could have added justices to the court until he got a majority that would support his legislative schemes. Good grief, we could have an unwieldly Supreme Court of 60 or 70 justices by now.

            A burglary was committed at the Watergate in an attempt to put Richard Nixon in the White House for a second term. Why? Because the stakes were high, very high. Nixon lied and lied about it. Why? Because the stakes were high, very high. Now the question is whether to replace Ginsburg before the November election or after. And the stakes are high, very high.

Don Frost blogs at www.commonsense931.wordpress.com