Cheap Seats 2018Only Saints Need Apply - 09/26
By Rich Trzupek
This week will give us a chance to see just how spineless Republican Senators are – or rather, how many spineless Republican Senators are currently lurking in Congress.
We appear to have elected representatives who are actually considering voting for or against a nominee for the Supreme Court based on whether one believes that the nominee behaved inappropriately as an allegedly drunk seventeen year old allegedly attempting to force his attentions on a allegedly unwilling fifteen year old, unsuccessfully according to the alleged victim, or that they believe this tale is 100 percent horse-puckey.
This is what we have come to as a nation. Or, more precisely, this is what the Republican party has come to. They are like the nerd in high school – of which I was most definitely one – who tries desperately to fit in with the cool kids instead of embracing and celebrating his or her nerd-dom.
I get where the Democrats are coming from. They would not give one tenth of one percent of a crap if John Marshall rose from the dead to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s qualifications as a learned, professional and thoughtful jurist. There is absolutely no chance that President Trump could nominate anyone who would be acceptable to the Democrat establishment.
That’s a given, and it’s an accepted given. The GOP was guilty of the same single-minded stubbornness when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Anton Scalia. It’s the world we live in today. We can bitch about it from either side to we are blue in the face, but nothing is going to change anytime soon.
The problem here is not the Dems voting in a block against Kavanaugh in what is effectively the same sort of tactic as when the Republicans used their Senate majority to prevent a vote on Garland. The problem is Republicans who appear willing to defect from their razor-thin majority block in the Senate based on the flimsiest of reasons.
If the new standard for accepting nominees for public office includes examination of non-criminal incidents that may or may not have happened while the nominee was in high school, then nobody can be nominated. It’s an absurd, ridiculous standard and the fact that there are Republican Senators willing to apply it is simply appalling. It’s the equivalent of those on the left who criticized Mitt Romney’s run for President on the basis that he might have engaged in bullying behavior while in grammar school.
You expect that sort of hypocrisy from the modern Democrat party and their allies in the mainstream media. They are more than happy to discount all of the allegations of sexual misconduct and downright assault that have – far more credibly – been attached to Bill Clinton. Anthony Weiner’s obsession with his wiener? That’s a yawner. Sexual scandals on the left are minimized, no matter how egregious. Sexual scandals on the right are maximized, no matter how questionable.
I hope that Republicans can come together in a mature way to confirm the nomination of a highly qualified Supreme Court candidate. Whether they will actually do so, is another question.
Email: Rich@examinerpublications.com
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