John Delach

Oy vay, what’s next? A life-ending comet strikes the earth. Yellowstone National Park morphs into super-volcano saturating most of North America in rocks, ash and lava, or an earthquake swallows the West Coast?

Day after day,

The people moving to LA.

Please don’t you tell anybody

The whole place slipping away.

Hurricanes abound, Covid stalks the land while we are clueless what will happen next. To top it off we are experiencing a raw, divided and divisive presidential campaign. Damn, what other crises abound?

Then just like that, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died. RIP Justice Ginsberg.

OMG, OMG!

The election is five weeks away. Unless President Trump is re-elected, his term in office would end on January 20, 2021. However, the new Congress will be sworn into office on January 3, 2021.

Politics in the land of US is so partisan, nasty and radical that common sense, meaningful debate and compromise are out of the question. In ordinary times, the nomination of the new justice would be delayed until the new Congress was installed and the president was inaugurated. I believe that is the proper way to steer our country. Expediency is the enemy of our Republic.

The idea that the GOP could put a nominee on track for Senate confirmation prior to the election, seemed to me a fool’s errand, but that’s exactly what the GOP plans to do. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, says he has the votes to confirm Trump’s unnamed nominee (as of this writing) and he is ready to proceed.  

When President Barak Obama nominated Merrick Garland as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in March of 2016, the same Senator McConnell prevented Judge Garland’s confirmation from ever coming to a vote. I disagreed with these tactics even though I understood what they were doing, preserving a seat that had belonged to a conservative justice, Anthonin Scalia.

I can just imagine the kind of tactics Senator Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, and the activist Democratic Senators will resort to derail the nomination? First off, they are trying to turn two additional GOP Senators to join  Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who have already announced their defection. Failing that, I expect the Democrats will dig up as much dirt as they can or threaten the use of a nuclear response like packing the court.

I already feel badly for the unfortunate woman who Trump selects who unwisely accepts his nomination. At least the Republicans were polite assassins when it came to Judge Garland. This time it promises to be a complete sh** show.