McConnell Must Hold Ground on Court Nomination

by Star Parker | February 22, 2016 12:02 am

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing the nation a service by announcing he will work to block President Obama’s appointment to replace Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and delay until after the election.

[1]

The inevitable resulting clash between the Senate and the White House, made sharper in the midst of an election, is a confrontation vital for the nation.

This is more than raw politics, Democrats versus Republicans. It is about ideology and bringing clarity to what the country has become and where it is headed.

America is extremely polarized today compared to where it was just 20 years ago.

In 2014, according to Pew Research data, 92 percent of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat. Just 20 years earlier, in 1994, it was just 64 percent. In 2014, 94 percent of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican. In 1994, it was 70 percent.

The far less polarized country of the past, when there was more common ground between the two parties, made compromise on court nominees more possible between the president and the Senate.

This is not the case today. President Obama isn’t just a Democrat. He is a liberal of the far left and will nominate a far left justice. The chance that he will send a candidate that can find common ground with conservative Republicans is practically zero.

Many are pointing out that President Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, and he was confirmed in the last year of Reagan’s presidency.

But despite Reagan being a conservative president, the whole country was far less polarized then, and Reagan himself was far more inclined to do business with the other party. Reagan sent two centrist jurists to the Supreme Court: Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor.

What has come of the Kennedy appointment? Kennedy voted with the liberals last year in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, providing the deciding vote in the 5-4 decision in which marriage was redefined.

Even in the remote chance that Obama would nominate a centrist like Kennedy, matters are too far gone in the country today to tolerate replacing Antonin Scalia with anyone less conservative.

The major domestic crises we face today trace to Supreme Court decisions.

Our massive fiscal imbalance is the result of the Court giving Congress wide new powers to tax and spend. The breakdown of the American family is traceable to court decisions to remove religion from our schools and public spaces, the legalization of abortion and now the redefinition of marriage.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It.

Also See,

Republicans Can Get More Black Votes