Have you wondered what’s been going on out in the world while we practice our “America First” policies–that is, in the absence of longstanding American international leadership? If so, here are three sources you might want to check out:
Friends on my Facebook page are going back and forth and back and forth about the value of the current White House Administration. What’s apparent is that America now is divided between two completely separate and irreconcilable realities. You know what they are, so I won’t go into them here.
Honesty is clearly crushed under the heel of political agendas and the personal desires of weak wannabe strongmen. So, the truth, while always still hoped for, is no longer to be expected, and that’s on all of us for being, like our politicians, so invested in our particular reality that we no longer value or even understand what is truth–or what truth is.
Out the proverbial window with honesty has gone integrity:
I’m sure that lots of examples can be cited from “both sides” (although I despise the constant call of “both sides, both sides, both sides,” which tends toward mitigating the often important differences between real good actions and real bad actions).
The most obvious example of this is the current bad action being undertaken to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016–an election year, yes, but certainly not in the final weeks of the campaign and even long before the national party conventions had selected their candidates. When President Obama brought forth a nomination to fill Justice Scalia’s seat, Mitch McConnell’s Senate refused to consider the nominated. Here are a few quotations from GOP Senators of the time:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas): “It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don’t do this in an election year.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “I don’t think we should be moving on a nominee in the last year of this president’s term – I would say that if it was a Republican president.”
Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.): “The very balance of our nation’s highest court is in serious jeopardy. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I will do everything in my power to encourage the president and Senate leadership not to start this process until we hear from the American people.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): “A lifetime appointment that could dramatically impact individual freedoms and change the direction of the court for at least a generation is too important to get bogged down in politics. The American people shouldn’t be denied a voice.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.): “The campaign is already under way. It is essential to the institution of the Senate and to the very health of our republic to not launch our nation into a partisan, divisive confirmation battle during the very same time the American people are casting their ballots to elect our next president.”
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.): “In this election year, the American people will have an opportunity to have their say in the future direction of our country. For this reason, I believe the vacancy left open by Justice Antonin Scalia should not be filled until there is a new president.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.): “The Senate should not confirm a new Supreme Court justice until we have a new president.”
Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.): “I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.”
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio): “I believe the best thing for the country is to trust the American people to weigh in on who should make a lifetime appointment that could reshape the Supreme Court for generations. This wouldn’t be unusual. It is common practice for the Senate to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term, and it’s been nearly 80 years since any president was permitted to immediately fill a vacancy that arose in a presidential election year.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.): “I strongly agree that the American people should decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. Senate.”
[And last but not least . . .]
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky): “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Thanks to Jon Anderson (probably not the lead singer of YES) for collecting these quotations and the one below.
Of course, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a politician of disabled integrity, from my birth state of South Carolina, said this in 2018:
“If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election.”
Obviously Graham and the rest of Mitch McConnell’s Senate have tossed these convictions to the wind, and with a full-throated “Screw you, stupid old me!” they’ve entered into the 11th-hour process of confirming a newly nominated conservative judge to what should be an apolitical entity–the Supreme Court.
Integrity loss confirmed. Again.
In an 1841 essay titled “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” While the “little minds” of the “little statesmen” quoted above have changed (avoiding “consistency”), their loss of integrity remains.
The loss of the nation–the loss of our democracy, at least–will surely follow it into a dis-integrated future.
