RUTHFULLY YOURS

I just got the dreadful news that Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead, age 79, this morning at a Texas resort. The death of a great man is always a cause for sadness. The passing of Justice Scalia is more than that: it is a national tragedy. Of course, President Obama will nominate and try to force through a left-wing jurist to the Court. The Senate, with its Republican majority, ought to be able to defer the nomination until the administration of the next president. But note that the Senate majority leader is Mitch McConnell, not a man who is known to stand up to bullies. These are trying times for the republic. I hope my irreligious friends will forgive me for asking that we all pray for the country.

As it happens, I wrote about Scalia just a few weeks ago. I thought it might be appropriate to repeat what I said here:

January 3, 2016

“Thank God for Justice Scalia.”

I’ve often found myself muttering that exhortation in recent years. I repeated it last June, for example, when reading Scalia’s masterly dissent to Obergefell, et al. v. Hodges, Director, Ohio Department of Health, et al., the Supreme Court case that took the definition of what counts as marriage away from the states and delivered it into the hands of one man, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Madame Blavatsky of the Bench. Kennedy looked into his crystal ball and determined that henceforth so-called “gay marriage” should be legal across the fruited plain. Why? Because, Kennedy wrote, “the Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” Er, what? Had he written such nonsense, Scalia retorted, he would “hide [his] head in a bag.” “The Supreme Court of the United States,” he continued in what is one of my favorite legal footnotes, “has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Indeed. And Scalia was pointed as well as droll. You might think, or at least say when the children ask, that the United States of America is a democracy in which We, the People are sovereign. Ha, ha, ha. Really, Scalia pointed out, we are an extreme oligarchy in which “the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” all of whom went to Harvard or Yale. Feeling better?

And just yesterday, speaking at a Roman Catholic school in Metairie, Louisiana, Scalia pointed out that, contrary to some extreme secularists, government support for religion is not only justified by the Constitution but has throughout most of our history been the unspoken norm. Moreover, he argued, “one of the reasons” that the Untied States has prospered so mightily is that the American people have always done God honor. “God has been very good to us,” he said. “That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name, we do him honor.”

Responding to the untimely passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, President Barack Obama declared that he will nominate a successor, breaking a nearly 100-year tradition. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican presidential candidates have encouraged him to wait for the next president, who will be elected this November.

“I plan to fulfill one of my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor, in due time,” Obama declared in a statement Saturday evening. “There will be plenty of time for me to do so and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.” Obama emphasized, “These are responsibilities that I take seriously and so should everyone— they are bigger than any one party, they are about our democracy.”

No lame duck president has nominated a Supreme Court justice in an election year for eighty years, a fact which both Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz mentioned in the Republican presidential debate Saturday evening.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa) said that “it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year.”

“Given the huge divide in the country, and the fact that this president, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda, it only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court Justice,” Grassley said.

Historically, many Supreme Court nominations made in a President’s final year in office are rejected by the Senate. That started with John Quincy Adams and last occurred to Lyndon B. Johnson.

It is critically important that the Senate hold pro forma sessions, since President Barack Obama would be able to make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court if the Senate goes out of session. Currently, there is a five-day recess this week and a two-week recess scheduled for April. There have been twelve such recess appointments to the high court. A recess appointment would last until the end of the Senate’s next session.

Historically, most presidents select a nominee within a week of a Supreme Court vacancy. However, there have been several lengthy vacancies when the Senate refused to play ball with controversial presidents or controversial nominees.

President John Tyler had a particularly difficult time filling vacancies. Smith Thompson died in office December 18, 1943. His replacement, Samuel Nelson, was in office starting February 14, 1845. That’s a vacancy of 424 days. Henry Baldwin died in office April 21, 1844. His replacement, Robert Cooper, was in office starting August 4, 1846. This vacancy lasted 835 days because Tyler could not get the Senate to work with him. During Tyler’s presidency, the Senate rejected nine separate Supreme Court nominations!

Most recently, Abe Fortas resigned May 14, 1969. His replacement, Harry Blackmun, was in office starting June 9, 1970, making the gap just longer than a year.

Several pending cases were expected to be 5-4 decisions. Crucially, the immigration (DAPA) case, United States v. Texas et al., and the mandatory union dues case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell cases on the contraception mandate accommodation.

Decisions that are tied with a 4-4 vote have no binding precedent and the decision of the lower court is upheld. This would be good in United States v. Texas et al., because the lower court’s decision was that states have standing to sue against an Obama policy that muzzles states from enforcing immigration laws.

Congress has frittered away virtually every constitutional power save one: the power of the Senate to deny presidential appointments to the federal bench. If Senate Republicans expect conservatives to ever trust them on anything, then they must decline to consider Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia.

There is precedent for this. In 1968, when Republicans were a Senate minority possessing only the power of filibuster, Everett Dirksen prevented Lyndon Johnson from appointing Associate Justice Abe Fortas to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren and then appointing Homer Thornbury to take Fortas’s seat as an associate justice.

Senate Minority Leader Dirksen did not run the Senate or control any Senate committees. Republicans, in fact, held only 36 Senate seats, and several of these were leftists. Yet Dirksen was able to cobble together enough senators to prevent Johnson from filling a Supreme Court office during a heated election year. The left, of course, squealed and yelled, but it lost, because Senate Republicans and a handful of Senate Democrats stood firm.

If Everett Dirksen, who was only a moderate conservative holding a very weak hand, was able to thwart LBJ, who had been Senate majority leader before he was vice president and who knew all the ropes and all the tricks of the Senate, then Senate Majority Leader McConnell clearly has the power to do the same.

In fact, all McConnell and the Republican leadership have to do is to decline to consider any nominee appointed by Obama. State clearly that the Senate is exercising its constitutional power and, unlike Obama who presumes powers he does not have, that the power to confirm or deny a presidential appointment is at the heart of the Senate’s control of the Executive Branch.

With the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia we stand at a very sober moment for our nation, a moment that finds the US Constitution – and the idea of constitutionality in general – in a very fragile state. With the make-up of the US Supreme Court existing on a razor’s edge between the conflicting ideologies of Progressivism (which views the Constitution as malleable) and Constitutionalism (which sees the document at a limitation on government) what happens in the next months will serve to chart the course for our country. The two paths couldn’t be more different: one a pathway to national demise.

I am want to recall a passage from a speech that Ronald Reagan gave in 1964:

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

Today, with the passing of Justice Scalia, the Republican and Conservative members of the United States Senate have met up with their own “rendezvous with destiny.” They will soon be presented with a nominee to the US Supreme Court from President Obama, a Far-Left Progressive who has already seated two political activists to the Court. It will be the Senate’s duty – not their option, but their duty – to deny Mr. Obama another Progressive seat on the US Supreme Court.

Progressives by their very nature believe that the US Constitution is a flawed document; something to be improved, perfected and otherwise titrated to the needs of the times. That is anathema to what the Framers intended and history bears that out. The Framers intended for the US Constitution to be the “chains” that binds government to the service of the nation, not the service to the ideological and/or the few.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying:

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-promises-to-nominate-successor-for-justice-antonin-scalia-1455417127?mod=trending_now_1

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.—The sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia presents President Barack Obama with both a historic opportunity and one of his steepest challenges during his last year in office.

Mr. Obama quickly sought to lay down his marker in what had already become a pitched political debate over Mr. Scalia’s successor in the hours after his death was announced Saturday.

The president stepped before the cameras during a golf vacation in California to make clear he wouldn’t leave Mr. Scalia’s vacancy for his successor to fill, as some Republicans have suggested. By addressing the matter immediately, Mr. Obama underscored how fiercely he intends to mount a public campaign to pressure the Senate to confirm the third Supreme Court nominee of his presidency.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” Mr. Obama said Saturday. “There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”

Mr. Obama will be the first president since Ronald Reagan, who nominated Mr. Scalia, to be tasked with filling three Supreme Court vacancies. He now faces a decision on what type of nominee to choose: a liberal, as desired by his Democratic Party base, or a moderate who may have a better chance of winning the 14 Republican votes needed to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to secure confirmation. READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN AT THE SITE

UPDATE: CBS News is reporting that the FBI is investigating the incident as a lone wolf terror attack. Suspect is a Somali, Mohamed Barry:

CBS News has identified the suspect as Mohamed Barry, however neither 10TV nor Columbus Police have confirmed the suspect’s name. CBS News also reports Barry has a Somali background and may have traveled to Dubai in 2012.

Law enforcement tells them the incident appears to be the type of “lone wolf terrorist attacks they’re trying to stop.”

The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

Original post:

A suspect who attacked patrons and staff at the Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, with a machete last night was shot and killed by police minutes later, and there are some indications that the attack may have been motivated by the owner’s Israeli heritage.

Four people were transported to the hospital, one critically injured. Victims were able to get video of the suspect’s car and a partial license plate. Police were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle and gave chase. After spinning the car out, the suspect emerged with both a machete and a knife and lunged at police, at which point the suspect was shot and killed.

We have a name of the suspect, but police so far have refused to confirm so we are holding it at this time.

At a press conference late last night, a police spokesman was asked by reporters about claims the suspect was on the terror watchlist:

A television ad for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign now airing in South Carolina shows the candidate declaring that “too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically.” She later adds: “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Her Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders, met with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders then tweeted that “As President, let me be very clear that no one will fight harder to end racism and reform our broken criminal justice system than I will.” And he appeared on the TV talk show “The View” saying, “It is not acceptable to see unarmed people being shot by police officers.”

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE