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As the body of Justice Scalia is laid to rest tomorrow, President Obama says he will skip the funeral, but, he says, the Constitution provides he move in a "timely way to replace him."
Republican Senate leadership promise they will not allow this president's nominee a vote, deferring to the next president to replace Scalia on the highest court in the land.
President Obama is warning the Republicans not to "play politics" by delaying the replacement---yet he, himself, as a US Senator filibustered against the nominee, now Justice, Samuel Alito.
President Obama's promise to fundamentally "remake America" will only be complete if he is allowed to seat Justic Scalia's replacement, thus ensuring a Left leaning activist Supreme Court.
President Obama and his political allies Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) and Sen. Harry Reid (NV) say they are "amazed" at the push back by Republicans toward his rush to replace Justice Scalia.
Reid told reporters, "The American people are going to make them pay if they jerk the president around like this," and Schumer says the Dems will get grassroots America to force the Republicans to back off and let the president make his choice.
It's interesting that they would have such a short and selective memory.
American Founder Patrick Henry said knowing the past is important to knowing the future.
Only a decade ago, Senator Obama (ILL) and 23 other Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, filibustered against Republican Supreme Court nominee, now Justice, Samuel Alito.
When asked about this matter, Obama's spokesperson Josh Earnest said the president now "feels badly about the way he handled the Alito nomination as a senator."---"He regrets the vote that he made."
A look further back is more gruesome.
The art of attacking, delaying and destroying nominees to the Supreme Court began in earnest back in 1987. And the leader of the demolition derby was none other than Senator Joe Biden.
Sen. Biden, as chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, presided over the then unprecedented savaging of Judge Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's 1987 nominee to the Supreme Court.
I hosted a daily television program during those years and was reporting on the hearings regularly. I recall clearly---none of us in this country had ever seen anything that approached the personal attacks on a Supreme Court nominee because of his personal beliefs---in this case, conservative beliefs, that Joe Biden and his cohorts inflicted on Robert Bork. It was brutal.
Finally Judge Bork, a highly qualified judge, withdrew from consideration.
A few years later, the same people waged war on George W. Bush's nominee Miguel Estrada with a 28 month filibuster, including 9 other filibusters of judicial nominees.
Before Mr. Estrada finally withdrew from consideration in 2003, the secular Progressive Left unleashed an attack not only against his conservative views, but even against his ethnicity.
An internal memo by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin's staff, discovered shortly after Mr Estrada withdrew, said Mr. Estrada was "especially dangerous" because "he is Latino."
Harry Reid said this week, "Republicans should not insult the American people's intelligence by pretending there is historical precedent for what they are about to do."
Monica Crowley with the Washington Times writes this week that the passing of the truly great Justice Scalia has already begun to set off a potentially cataclysmic collision between all three branches of government.
She says Obama has "wrapped the tentacles of leftism around every part of the nation," but "has not yet cemented the transformation, however, which is why he so desperately needs to control the future of the Supreme Court."
One more appointment will accomplish that for Obama.
Crowley looks back at Senator Obama for clarity on what this Supreme Court nomination means to him personally---his personal agenda.
Sen. Obama, speaking to WBEZ radio in 2001, explained that he advocated wealth redistribution as reparations for slavery and other injustices toward "previously dispossessed peoples."
He said, "But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the [Earl] Warren court, it wasn't that radical."
He then made one of the most revealing statements he has ever made about what he really is trying to do to America.
He said, on the record, "[The Warren Court] didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties."
He continued, "It says what the states can't do to you, it says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf...One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there is a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."
While his spokespeople deny it, this is the fundamental core belief of the man we made president.
These comments go much further than the constant comments by Leftists about a "living Constitution" in which the Document conceptually passively evolves.
These statements define the core beliefs and goals of Barack Obama.
Justice Scalia was a bulwark against such thinking, as were our Founding Fathers.
This is a battle in which Mitch McConnell cannot---must not, cave and become squishy, as the Republican leaders have done so often during the Obama presidency.
They must fight the president's nomination as if the Constitution depends on it---because it does.
Fifty-five unassuming men after days of vigorous debate---and finally prayer, gave us our Constitution---our Founding document, resulting in the greatest nation in the history of the world.
As Ben Franklin left the Constitution Convention, a women stepped up to him and said, "Sir, may I ask what kind of country have you given us---a democracy or a monarchy?"
Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
Some years later, Senator Daniel Webster, recognized as one of the greatest and most effective senators to ever serve this nation, told the Supreme Court, "Hold on my friends to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."
Reminding his audience that we must never forget that biblical teaching and values were the basis for America's founding documents, he said, "The hand that destroys the Constitution rends our Union asunder forever."
The importance of denying this man the appointment of another anti-Constitution activist justice cannot be overstated.
May God help us.