On Saturday, February 13, 2016, while on a hunting trip at the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Texas, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia finally did what many people – mostly liberals, of course – had been wishing he would do for three solid decades. He laid down and died. I subsequently spent three hours of my Sunday afternoon on the telephone with my dear sister Rose’s husband, Hank, and his sister-in-law, Shannon, discussing Scalia’s demise. As regular readers of this Web log know, Hank and Shannon are highly conservative Catholics, just like Justice Scalia was, and their first reaction to reports of his passing was one of extreme, conspiratorial hysteria. As far as Hank and Shannon, hunkered down in their survival bunker in a remote region of West Virginia were concerned, Scalia had obviously been murdered, and the only real question concerning that proposition was who is responsible, and an urgent call to me was the best way to resolve their argument. Shannon is convinced that President Barack Hussein Obama, in his usual role as the Antichrist, is the evil criminal mastermind, while Hank’s preferred explanation is that Leonard Nimoy, who, as every good conspiracy theorist knows, faked his own death in 2015 in order to cover up assuming leadership of the Illuminati, ordered the hit.
There are plenty of other stories in which the faithful are invited to believe, too. Over the ensuing week, fingers were pointed at the CIA, whose nefarious secret assassin supposedly used a “heart attack gun” to dispatch the American right wing’s legal darling, for example. Furthermore, other highly imaginative observers have donned their tinfoil thinking caps and sought to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton, Kim Jong-un, Michael Bloomberg, the Mossad, the Iranians, ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Rod Blagojevich, the Bush family, Ted Cruz, the Masons, the Red Chinese and Planned Parenthood, to name but a few, and the raucous chorus demanding a full-blown forensic autopsy be performed on the corpse of a seventy-nine year old man who passed away in bed continues to grow, both in volume and stridency. But the insanity apparently inherent in this situation has by no means remained confined to the paranoid classes; oh, no – the phenomenon of Big Nino kicking the bucket while still in the saddle has, it seems, driven all of Washington straight off the deep end, as evidenced by a visit Friday morning from Barry Welch Birch, Strategic Advisor to the Republican National Committee.
“Damn it all, Collins,” he complained as he threw himself down wearily on my office couch in front of the picture window overlooking the White House, sprawling dejectedly before throwing a rueful glance over his shoulder at it, “Scalia sure as hell picked a rotten time to [expletive] die.”
“When the government appoints people to federal positions for life,” I observed, “it stands to reason that some of those folks might actually take Uncle Sam at his word.”
“Yeah,” he grumbled, “but couldn’t he at least have held on another eleven months, for Christ’s sake?”
“So Donald Trump could appoint his replacement, you mean?” I japed.
At that, Birch sat bolt upright and jabbed his right index finger at me as he spoke. “Donald [expletive] Trump is never going to be president! He’s not even going to be the Republican Party nominee!”
“Do I hear the sound of someone whistling past the graveyard?” I prodded. “Remember what the Dormouse said, ‘Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.’”
“I’m not in denial,” he insisted, “about anything! Yeah, maybe it might be Ted Cruz, or it might be Marco Rubio, or even John Kasich, but no [expletive] way is Donald Trump going to represent the Republican Party in a battle against Hillary Clinton!”
“And no way,” I surmised, “that Barack Hussein Obama is going to get a Supreme Court nomination past a Republican-controlled Senate?”
“No way, no how,” he confidently declared. “And the polls back me up on that, too.”
“Depends on how the pollsters ask the question,” I noted. “But even if you ask John Q. Public, as CBS News did, ‘Would you like to see the next Supreme Court justice appointed by President Obama before the election in November or appointed by the president who will be elected in November?’ or, alternatively, as the Wall Street Journal put it, ‘Would you prefer the U.S. Senate vote this year on the replacement nominated by President Obama or leave the position vacant and wait to vote next year on the replacement nominated by the new president?’ the results, pro and con, differ by only a single percentage point in favor of your view. Given the usual three point margin of error, then, no poll has shown that a statistically significant majority of Americans want the Senate to wait until after the election. But on the other hand, the Reuters poll, with its own different wording to the same basic question, returned a 54 to 37 percent margin in favor of the Senate confirming an Obama appointee. And, in what I must say is probably an extremely galling irony for Fox News, their poll returned a 62 to 34 percent result agreeing that ‘It’s still the responsibility of current leaders, President Obama and the Senate, to take action to fill the vacancy now.’ I’ll bet whoever made up the Fox News poll question is licking out the eighteen carat gold plated toilet in Roger Ailes’ private jet right now.”
“It’s twenty-four carat gold,” Birch shot back, “and for your information, she was down on her knees doing that last night.”
“It must be really rough,” I speculated, “when the Republican Party’s own media organization can’t deliver the poll results that you want.”
“Well, [expletive] the polls, anyhow,” he definitely proclaimed. “Maybe the Constitution says the president gets to nominate Supreme Court justices, but it also says that the Senate shall advise upon and consent to those nominations, and that black-[expletive] [expletive] [expletive] over there in the White House isn’t going to get Jack [expletive] in the way of either out of Mitch McConnell.”
“And that’s the way you like it?” I inquired with a tone of studied skepticism.
“Me personally?” he replied. “Yeah, I like it fine. We’ve done a pretty damn good job of shutting Obama down for the last seven years, and I don’t see any reason to quit now. But the majority of the movers and shakers at the RNC these days aren’t so sure.”
“They’re concerned,” I asked, “that the Democrats will turn the nomination into a campaign issue?”
“They’re concerned,” he sardonically echoed, “that trying to block Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in the Senate will backfire and give the Democrats ammunition for the 2016 class-three Senate contests in the twenty-four states with Republican incumbents.”
“Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin,” I pointed out, “are even money.”
“And Pennsylvania, Ohio, and even North Carolina are far from being guaranteed,” he ruefully muttered.
“So even if you think your colleagues are behaving like wussies,” I said, “you have to agree with them that eight Senate seats is a lot to risk.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he growled, taking out a Cohiba Siglo VI and slowly lighting it up. “What’s more, they’re afraid that if Obama nominates somebody who turns out to be moderate and popular, attempting to obstruct the appointment might have negative effects that spill over into the House and gubernatorial races; maybe even screw things up on the state and local level.”
“So,” I concluded, “even though Republicans like you and Mitch McConnell might think playing Constitutional hardball with Obama continues to be a good idea, in this particular case, the RNC in general is having second thoughts.”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded, contemplating a large billowing cloud of cigar smoke rising above his head. “That’s why they sent me here. So tell me, when Obama nominates some lesbian law professor from the University of California at Berkeley who’s gay married to a butch bull dyke socialist community organizer, what can we ask Mitch McConnell to do besides refusing to hold confirmation hearings?”
“Do something Antonin Scalia would never do – something, in fact, he would never want to do,” I recommended. “Something so repugnant to him, he would rather have sucked on Gloria Steinem’s nose until her feminazi head caved in.”
“And what,” he wondered aloud, puffing out another huge cloud of Cuban primo cigar smoke, “would that be?”
“Interpret the Constitution creatively,” I declared. “Take that part where it says the Senate must ‘advise and consent,’ and extrapolate the ‘advise’ part. Take the position that ‘advise’ the president means that, should the circumstances warrant it, the Senate can suggest alternatives to the president’s Supreme Court nominations.”
“And the ‘circumstances which warrant’ such actions?” he sneered. “What would those be?”
“Well,” I suggested, “how about (a) the Supreme Court vacancy occurred unexpectedly and without warning; (b) the incumbent president has less than a year left in his second term; and (c) there are deep and genuine philosophical differences between the president and a majority of the United States Senate?”
“Okay,” he conceded, “at least that sounds plausible. Can you give me an example?”
“Certainly,” I vouched. “Taking your own hypothetical as a starting point, the Senate Majority Leader would issue a statement which would read, “While Senate Republicans duly recognize Professor Judy Liberal’s academic credentials and appreciate her outstanding contributions to the legal scholarship and jurisprudence of gay rights, central city urban voter registration and redistribution of wealth, we cannot help but notice her equally significant issues concerning what we believe the majority of Americans would think of her politics, morals and lifestyle. We understand that Professor Liberal is a vegan who shops exclusively at Whole Foods, practices Taoism and maintains a residence in Colorado where she and her wife grow their own marijuana for personal consumption. She is enthusiastically in favor of banning the firearms which we are certain that most Americans would consider absolutely necessary for self defense, home protection and legitimate hunting pursuits. She has publicly stated that she favors taxpayer funding for the murder of unborn babies, while consistently opposing imposition of the death penalty, no matter how heinous the crime. She is in favor of issuing drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens, to whom she refers as ‘undocumented workers,’ as well as providing their children with government subsidized health care, education, food and shelter. In addition, she is on record as considering covert surveillance of Muslims for counterterrorism purposes to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. For these and numerous other reasons, the Republican Senate majority proposes an alternative nominee, Judge Andrew Atavist. This distinguished member of the federal bench has a record which speaks for itself, reflecting the values of a staunch but compassionate conservative adherent to strict Originalism. He not only owns a total of six eighteenth century English dictionaries, all of which were published in America between 1776 and 1791, that he uses to interpret the Constitution, he also holds a PhD degree in American history of the Revolutionary period. He is thus superbly qualified among potential candidates to know exactly what the Constitution meant when it was written and, moreover, firmly believes that it should never be held to mean anything else. In addition, Judge Atavist is a practicing Evangelical Baptist who has been born again and accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Unlike the president’s nominee, who will never have a family unless the misguided authorities in California allow her to adopt some unfortunate waif, Judge Atavist, who can certify that both he and his wife were virgins until marriage, is the father of eleven children, all of whom have been home-schooled in the best tradition of American conservative family values. Judge Atavist is a four-square backer of the Second Amendment. His personal home arsenal contains seventeen handguns, five shotguns, nine hunting rifles and six AR-15 assault weapons. He firmly believes that corporations are people, and that patents always belong to the company with the most money. He knows that God created the entire universe in one week six thousand years ago, and he also knows global warming for the cynical atheist hoax that it is. He realizes that the minimum wage and Social Security are outdated relics of Communist ideology and must be abolished, along with public health care plans of any and every type. He knows that spying on Muslims and other similar threats to national security is not only legal but absolutely necessary, and that sometimes police have to shoot people in order to save the rest of society from abject anarchy. He is aware that the female human physiology is completely capable of shutting down conception in cases of genuine rape, and furthermore realizes that in the vast majority of alleged rapes, she was asking for it. He doesn’t think that race, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, physical disability or gender identification should have any bearing on legal, hiring, promotion, transportation, accommodation, housing or any other decisions made in our society except those affecting property rights, efficient operation of free economic markets, eminent domain, maritime navigation, foreign trade, national defense or free exercise of the Christian religion. For these and many other, similar reasons, the majority of the United States Senate endorses Judge Atavist as a superior alternative to Professor Liberal for filling this untimely and unfortunate vacancy on the Supreme Court, and we encourage all Americans who agree with us to immediately text, phone, email and tweet the White House, telling President Obama that you agree with the Senate majority’s recommendation.”
“Holy [expletive],” Birch exclaimed, carefully examining the extraordinary length of ash which had developed on his cigar. “I had no idea a human being could extemporaneously compose and deliver an entire press release like that, right off the top of their head. You must be some kind of mental freak or something.”
“I do have some unusual talents,” I admitted.
“Now that I’ve heard you out,” Birch nodded, “I’d say it’s a pretty damn good idea. Can you write down that spiel you just rattled off?”
“Of course,” I assured him. “Word for word. Shall I?”
“Yes,” Birch affirmed, “then send it to my administrative assistant immediately. And by the way, can I get the contact information for Judge Atavist?”
“I’m afraid he’s… ah… not available for service on the Supreme Court,” I answered.
“Really?” Birch harrumphed. “How come?”
“Um… personal reasons,” I lied. “I will, however, convey your interest to him, in case he changes his mind.”
“Okay, Collins,” Birch barked as he stubbed out his cigar, rose from the couch and strode toward the door. “You do that.”