The headlines today deal with revelations about President Trump’s taxes over the past two decades and I will comment on this in a future blog. Today I would like to denounce the hypocrisy in the U.S. Senate which is happening right before our eyes.
Back in February of 2016 Justice Antonin Scalia died which left a vacancy on the Supreme Court. President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Scalia on the Court. The Republican controlled Senate refused to give Garland the necessary hearing. They claimed that a Supreme Court replacement should not take place during the last year of a president’s term in office. The battle cry was “Let the people decide through the presidential election in November’ (even though that meant an unfilled vacancy in the Supreme Court for ten months).
On September 18, 2020 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Those same Republican senators who argued that the Court should remain vacant for ten months (McConnell, Graham, Grasse, Rubio, Cruz, etc.) now argue that the vacancy should be filled immediately through a nomination by President Trump. The overarching principle of “Let the people decide by voting in the presidential election” has been thrown overboard.
Lindsey Graham is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that governs the “advise and consent” Senate process of confirming Supreme Court nominations. He used to be a person of principle, but he has sold out his soul. In 2016 he said, “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president whoever it might be, make that nomination.” In 2018 he was even more clear, “if a Supreme Court opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait until the next election.” Graham has broken his word. He is afraid that Trump will lose the election and that Biden will nominate a person much more liberal than a nominee by Trump. Lindsey Graham is a hypocrite and should be so judged by his own words. He is practicing the morally bankrupt maxim of “the end justifies the means”. But you cannot obtain a good end (a Supreme Court justice of your preference) by using the immoral means of breaking your word.
The defenses by the Republican senators are twofold. The first is that times have changed and the White House and the Senate are controlled by the same party. That was not the heart of their argument four years ago. Then they said, “Let the people vote!” They also claim that the Democrats would do the same if they were in their shoes. If Democrats practiced the same hypocrisy, I would denounce them as well. I have criticized Democrats before and I would denounce them again. Our ethical principles mean nothing if we don’t apply them to friend and foe alike. Let’s clean out the swamp of hypocrisy in our midst.
Lindy Scott 