The Trump/Trump-Party push to ram through a Supreme Court appointment as a presidential election is just around the corner has been attacked on various grounds. Here’s one more that can and should be used.
- (The main basis for attack is that the Republicans in the Senate are showing their rank hypocrisy by refusing to act in accordance with the “principle” they so emphatically declared in 2016 to deny President Obama his constitutional right to name a successor to a Justice who died in February of a presidential election year.
- Another is precedent, that so close to an election as this the appointment process has awaited the inauguration of the newly-elected President, as in 1864 when Abraham Lincoln waited until he’d successfully been re-elected before filling the vacancy that had been created by the death of Chief Justice Taney.
- And additionally, there’s the reality that a substantial majority of Americans, polls have shown, say that it is the winner of the Presidential Election who should name the new justice.)
It is not only the hypocritical Republicans in the Senate who should be attacked here. There’s also the President who has just this week outrageously attacked our constitutional order. The argument should be advanced: A President who is regularly showing that he has no respect for the Constitution — the Constitution he took an oath to protect and defend — has forfeited the right to name someone to the highest Court in the land, the body whose job it is to decide for the nation what the Constitution means and requires.
The moment for such a declaration of Trump’s disqualifying himself has arrived due to his lying to the American people to sow false doubts about the legitimacy of the results of an election, and by his unprecedented calling into question his willingness to abide by the results of the election and to accept the peaceful transfer of power if he is defeated.
That conduct is an assault on the foundations of the Constitution, which is an agreement to respect the choice of the people as it expresses itself in the electoral process.
That agreement is the foundation of the system because it governs how the powers of the state get assigned, and lodges the power to make that determination in the will of the people.
It is that agreement that has enabled Americans to live — more almost all our history -- in peace and navigate our way well enough despite our differences. it will be
And Donald Trump’s attack on that agreement is an unforgiveable assault — never before seen from an American President — on the rule of America’s most fundamental law. And thus shows him to be unqualified to name to the Court someone whose job it will be to uphold the Constitution.
(Not that any such argument will deter the Rs from ramming this through. But it could have the beneficial effect of fortifying the public sentiment that what the Rs are doing is wrong. And as I argued yesterday — in “If You Ram Through Your SCOTUS Theft, We'll Ram Through Stripping You of Your Ill-Gotten Powers” — it will be valuable for any future bold Democratic moves, once Democrats have power, to prepare the public to perceive those moves not as violations of norms but as “the righting of wrongs,” and of “hardball being met by hardball.”)