… about individual decisions and autonomy. Soap-box occupant Erick Erickson, who annoys me with email that he thinks will entice recipients into sending him money, manages to play to his fringe-right audience, if not to truth:
Every time Americans turn inward against each other, it is because of the Supreme Court. From Dred Scott to Roe v. Wade and a variety of points in between, the flaw of our constitutional republic is letting an oligarchy of five black-robed masters impose the morality of Harvard Yard on 350 million of their fellow citizens.
The Civil War was caused by SCOTUS? The Civil Rights movement? Creationism? Abortion?
SCOTUS may become involved, but don’t mistake them for a motivating force. The motivations are various, but indisputable: loving wealth over justice, racial hatreds, religious manias, broken intellectual arguments. SCOTUS may get involved, but it’s inevitably at the tail end of the story, not the start. To blame SCOTUS for divisiveness is to play to an audience preconception, not to honestly interpret history.
We are here, at this moment particularly, because of something too few want to say out loud. One of those oligarchs decided to gamble with her own life, impervious to calls for removal, so that she could try to shape the balance of the United States Supreme Court.
There are so many things wrong with this broken paragraph that I’m not even sure where to start. Oligarchs? Few, if any, of the Justices are extensive landowners or chieftains of industry. Was Ruth Bader-Ginsburg (RBG) a doddering fool, no longer competent to evaluate the legal arguments presented? Not that I heard, not a whisper. Just how was RBG reshaping the balance of power of SCOTUS, when all that can happen is that she is, at best for Democrats, be replaced by another “liberal justice”?
And did RBG really gamble her life by staying on the Court?
Really?
How was she risking her life? She wouldn’t get pancreatic cancer if she retired? What, has there been an advance in oncology that slipped by me?
This dark and brooding paragraph, which seeks to inflict blame for the chaos that seems incipient on liberals, is based wholly on a series of falsehoods for which, quite frankly, Erickson should be ashamed – or seen for the unblushing partisan that he is.
She could have left while Obama was still there. But no, Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided to hang on through a pancreatic cancer fight hoping to use herself as a rallying cry for the left to mobilize in November and shape the election.
Now, thanks to her pride, we’re going to get more riots.
Uh huh. Sure. But hang on, let me just say one name: Merrick Garland.
Given the unrestrained hypocrisy of Senator McConnell, I could easily see McConnell refusing to review, much less vote on, any replacement for RBG. Sure, Obama had two justices confirmed – but Kagan, the second, was confirmed in 2010, when Democrats dominated the Senate with 57 members. In the next Senate, Democrats barely had a majority at 51 – and Democrats can be fractious, especially if they’re, at least in part, consulting their consciences.
So, if I were to continue this intellectually and morally flawed line of reasoning, RBG might have been able to resign with hopes of being replaced by a liberal through 2013.
But why?
According to Erickson, to satisfy the political requirements of a political party.
This, from a defender of the right wing, the shrine of individual rights. I don’t need to go on; it’s simply a hypocritical stance.
But Erickson wants to avoid the moral taint that has come to plague the entire Republican Party. He (and if he wishes to dispute it, he’ll have to disown his insane remark about Trump Derangement Syndrome) and the Republican Party support President Trump, a man documented as the veritable Father of Lies, with 20,000+ lies in less than 4 years. This is how they’ll all be known to history: power-hungry hypocritical liars, pushing anti-science and anti-rational ideologies on a nation that could ill-afford them.
Therefore, he’ll throw the blame on a dead woman who can no longer defend herself. A woman who certainly should have the right to decide when she’ll retire.
A woman who may have wanted to believe that the Republican Party was still the home of honorable people.
So, yeah, this was the morning’s entertainment: an immediate attempt to throw the blame for the irresponsibilities of the Republican Party onto the shoulders of a woman who served her nation to the best of her very considerable capabilities for decades. That’s her reward.
But that’s how a true politico rolls these days. Any bullshit to make the other side look bad. It’s too bad; Erickson has done better in the past.
