Yes it’s maddening, but on a different level there is also something very comforting about watching high and mighty Republican Senators expose themselves as hypocrites of the highest order in a naked grab for power. It’s a powerful reminder that underneath it all, they’re no better than the rest of us, just a bit more connected and a lot more full of themselves.
Americans had yet to pay respect to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia when a host of Republican United States Senators, including two presidential candidates (Cruz & Rubio) and Pennsylvania’s own Pat Toomey, publicly expressed their intent to abdicate their constitutional responsibility to advise our President and consent to appoint a duly qualified jurist to take Scalia’s place on the high court. Not only have those Senators besmirched Scalia’s legacy of unwavering support for contextually interpreting our Constitution, they’ve also demonstrated they are unfit for public office. Were he still among us, Justice Scalia would have brutally eviscerated the suggestion that U.S. Senators renounce their constitutional obligation and swiftly called for their resignation, regardless of political affiliation.
Throughout his tenure on the bench, Justice Scalia disdained public officials who refused to fully execute the duties of their office. In February 2002, speaking at a death penalty conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a week earlier at a similar symposium in Chicago, Justice Scalia defended his view that an originalist reading of the U.S. Constitution demanded that judges who refuse to perform their constitutional duty to impose the death penalty should resign their position immediately. Scalia reiterated that view on countless occasions during the years that followed and never retreated from that position in any Supreme Court opinion he authored.
Justice Scalia recognized that the potential for political gain or one’s personal beliefs do not justify or excuse the abdication of a constitutionally imposed responsibility, and he would never have approved of a wholesale betrayal of constitutional principles for political gain. To do so would justify the charge that Senate Republicans are unprincipled hypocrites of the highest order and that they have no appreciation or respect for the principles and obligations embodied in our Constitution.
The drafters of America’s Constitution wisely recognized that political winds ebb and flow, each according to its own merit, but only a constitution set in stone, with its attending rights and obligations could withstand the test of time. They also believed, and rightly so, that in order to insure the continuation of our republic as intended, those who pledge to uphold our constitutional form of government must fulfill their duty without exception or delay and without regard for their own personal or political beliefs.
Abraham Lincoln, America’s greatest Republican President once famously warned, “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”
Take heed, Republicans. Truer words have never been spoken!
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