This column was going to be about Joe Biden’s proposed tax policy, right up until Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed.
I suppose my topic didn’t officially change until a few hours after RBG’s death, on Saturday, when Donald Trump vowed to fill her Supreme Court seat “without delay.” Still, from the moment of Ginsburg’s death, there was never any real doubt that Trump, goaded on by the vampire of the Senate Mitch McConnell, would disavow everything his party said four years ago when Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland. The Republicans were going to try to ram a new Supreme Court Justice down Americans’ throats six weeks before an election.
Nobody reading this is unfamiliar with what happened in 2016, but if you need a quick reminder, Obama nominated the moderate D.C. Circuit veteran Garland to fill the seat left vacant following the death of Antonin Scalia. Scalia died in February of that year, months before the November election. But Senate Majority Leader McConnell, along with his many Republican lackeys, refused to hold proceedings of any kind on Garland’s appointment. Instead, they behaved as if no vacancy existed at all on the Supreme Court, until Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch less than two weeks after taking office in January of 2017.
The thrust of McConnell’s argument, in February 2016, was that it was too close to the November presidential election to fill a Supreme Court seat and that it should be up to the voters to decide who got to fill the vacancy. In addition to McConnell, at least 17 other Republican Senators who are still in the Senate are on the record in 2016 making the same supposedly principled stand in favor of a democratic response to a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year.
Now it is six weeks before a presidential election instead of nine months, and there’s no principled stand in 2020. Rather, most Senate Republicans are champing at the bit to fill RBG’s seat before Trump is frog-marched out of the Oval Office in January. To give their position the thinnest veneer of logical legitimacy, Republicans have offered a dumb excuse about this year being different from 2016 because the Senate majority shares the party of the president, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be able to see through that.
Tragically, for about a third of Americans, it just does not matter. Republicans do not care if their leaders say one thing, and then do the exact opposite. They don’t care that their president has told more than 20,000 documented, provable lies since taking office. “All politicians lie,” they tell themselves and anyone else who will listen. But there is a difference between saying anything you think people want to hear, truth be damned, versus misstating something, or making an earnest promise that doesn’t go as planned, or even exaggerating within the limits of good taste. There is a difference between a good excuse, and a flimsy façade. Intent matters. But in Trump-world, there’s no difference between anything. Lies, corruption, and hypocrisy simply do not matter, as long as they’re coming from your side. Republicans parrot the party line, and then take that nearly translucent justification at face value.
In October 2008, a Minnesota woman at a Republican town hall event said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, um, he’s an Arab.” John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate running against Obama, grabbed the microphone from her and said, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about.” At that town hall, McCain defended Obama a second time as a “decent person” and as a president people need not fear. McCain was booed. And McCain lost.
But at least when McCain died 10 years later, he died with his honor intact. McCain swam against the dark tide swallowing his party. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t correct nonsense conspiracy theories, or defend his political opponents from baseless attacks that undermine the integrity of our system of peaceful transfers of power. Trump does the exact opposite. A little over a third of our population cheers him on, and over half the Senate lets him get away with it.
The concept of honor is as foreign to today’s Republican Party as it is to a rattlesnake. With RBG gone, all we can hope for is that at least four Republican senators want to be able to look in the mirror and see something other than a power-hungry cynic, or a self-deluded liar.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.