How Democrats Squandered the Political Authority to Select Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court Successor September 27, 2020 Vol. XIII, No. 10 10:13 am Ginsburg First Woman & Jewish American to Lie in State at US Capitol On Friday morning, September 25, 2020, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman and first Jewish
[More…]
How Democrats Squandered the Political Authority to Select Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court Successor
September 27, 2020 Vol. XIII, No. 10 10:13 am
Ginsburg First Woman & Jewish American to Lie in State at US Capitol
On Friday morning, September 25, 2020, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman and first Jewish American to lie in state in the US Capitol. A well-earned distinction. I cannot think of anyone in my lifetime that I have grown to admire more than the Notorious RBG.
Justice Ginsburg’s wish was that her replacement be selected by the winner of the presidential race in November, surely with hopes that the winner would be the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. Afterall, she was the lioness of the left wing of the Court.
Unfortunately, DC Democrats have squandered the political authority to pick Ginsburg’s replacement due to four years of vendetta-driven political fiascos over the loss of the White House to Donald Trump. Those fiascos include the Russian collusion investigation, the confirmation hearings of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the impeachment hearings and trial of President Trump, the Cancel Culture (“you’re a racist if you disagree with me”) fiasco, and, most recently, the “Defund the Police” while I loot and burn your business fiasco.
The authority and honor to select Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor will instead go to President Trump and the Republican majority members in the US Senate who have already secured the 51 votes needed to confirm the nominee.
President Trump announced his nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, on Saturday, in the White House Rose Garden. Barrett, a former law professor at Notre Dame, is the mother of seven children, two adopted from Haiti, and a devout Catholic.
Trump and Tillis now likely to win with Barrett as running mate
Politically, the confirmation hearings on Judge Barrett will be a boon for President Trump and Republicans in toss-up races like Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC. It shifts the attention of voters away from the coronavirus, which is good politically for Trump, and gives Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, an opportunity to prove his conservative bona fides to Republicans in North Carolina, ranked the 8th most “Very Religious” state by Gallup’s State of the States national study.
Judge Barrett, a working mom, will essentially be a running mate for both Trump and Tillis, which will likely increase their support from undecided suburban white women and increase turnout of faith-based voters. Barrett’s personal commitment to her young family and to her Catholic faith will endear her to Hispanic and Black voters, already showing up in polls as likely to vote for President Trump in record numbers over issues like school choice and economic opportunity zones.
Barrett’s confirmation will likely sail through the Senate before election day. That is because Senate Democrats cannot risk another confirmation fiasco like the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, a bungled character assassination attempt that contributed to the loss of four Democratic Senators in 2018.
Kavanaugh Hearings Political Fiasco
In September 2018, the US Senate Judiciary Committee began the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. For weeks, Democrats tried but failed to discredit Kavanaugh’s three-decade legal career, including his 12-year record on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, a record that included the fact that Chief Judge Merrick Garland, the judge President Obama wanted to appoint to the Supreme Court, joined in 96% of the majority opinions authored by Judge Kavanaugh.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while speaking at George Washington University Law School on September 12, 2018, referred to the Kavanaugh hearings as a “highly partisan show.” Ginsburg then added, “The way it was, was right. The way it is, is wrong.”
In saying, “The way it was, was right,” Ginsburg was referring to the unanimous bipartisan confirmation of her friend Justice Antonin Scalia in 1986 and her near-unanimous confirmation in 1993.
In 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg received a bipartisan 96-3 vote in the U.S. Senate on her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. Forty (40) of 43 Republican Senators voted for Ginsburg’s confirmation, despite her 10 years with the liberal stronghold ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
Even North Carolina’s newly elected conservative Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth voted for Ginsburg. (Sen. Jesse Helms, R-NC, was one of the three Republicans who voted against Ginsburg.)
As for the Kavanaugh hearing, bipartisan civility ended before the first witness was sworn in.
After failing to discredit Kavanaugh on his career or his view of the Constitution, Senate Democrats decided to destroy Kavanaugh’s character by revealing a letter from a teenage friend who said he groped her at a party during high school. She named four witnesses. Not one corroborated her story. No one at the party, including a life-long friend, recalled anything about the party.
The moment Senate Democrats abandoned the time-honored right of the accused to a presumption of innocence and insisted that we should “believe the woman” accuser without evidence or corroboration, the Kavanaugh hearings became a political fiasco with disastrous consequences.
Four Senate Democrats who voted against Kavanaugh lost their campaigns for reelection in 2018: Senators Heidi Heitkamp, D-ND, Joe Donnelly, D-IN, Claire McCaskill, D-MO, and Bill Nelson, D-FL. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, the only Democrat to vote for Kavanaugh, won his race.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation will likely sail through the Senate before election day, giving President Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis the political boost they need to win on November 3, all because DC Democrats squandered their political authority.
– END –
Thank You for reading the John Davis Political Report
John N. Davis
Virtual or On-Site Speech: For in a virtual or on-site political presentation for your upcoming meetings, check my availability here www.johndavisconsulting.com/speech-request/ for a 45-minute presentation on 2020 likely winners, federal and state races.
