The Walsh post:
I’m not often “shocked” by the
deaths of famous people, particularly if they’re 79-years-old, but when I
read that Justice Antonin Scalia died, I actually let out
an audible gasp. He was one of our nation’s last true constitutionalists,
a just man, a godly man, a great man, and his passing will leave a great hole
in the conservative movement, the nation itself and especially the Supreme
Court court. And that hole will be made even bigger if Obama is allowed to
appoint the person who fills it.
Some notes on the jumbled mess
left in the wake of this national tragedy:
Aside from being a good title for a
death metal album, that about summarizes the way many liberals reacted to
Scalia’s passing. Yes, yes, it’s the Internet and these are leftists, what else
would you expect? Not much else, to be sure, but we shouldn’t reach a point
where the predictability of deplorable behavior suddenly becomes its own
excuse.
Within minutes of the man’s
death — and this, by the way, is a man with a wife, nine kids and dozens
of grandkids — progressives erupted with applause and jubilation all over social media.
Plenty of outlets have compiled some of the celebratory remarks, but that probably isn’t
necessary. If you didn’t see it, you can imagine. And keep in mind, these
weren’t just a few scattered bad apples, but thousands and thousands of human
beings gloating over the still warm corpse of a man so decent and admirable
that some of his closest friends belonged to the ideological group now exalting
in his demise. And these weren’t merely anonymous trolls on Twitter, but famous folks and folks in media and seemingly regular folks who used their
real names and real pictures to post triumphant and sarcastic obituaries. Then,
not satisfied with ghoulishly dancing on a freshly dug grave, thousands
more began offering their fervent prayers that Clarence
Thomas die next.
It was an insane, subhuman display. Evil, and proudly so. Another
moment — one of many, often provided by leftists — that
made me utterly ashamed of what this country has become.
I took about 50 screenshots of
Tweets and messages sent directly to me and thought about posting them, but
I’ve decided against it. Many of the comments cannot be
published — like the fantasies about defecating on Scalia’s
grave and defiling his corpse in various explicit ways — and the rest
are from other callous hobgoblins too consumed by their own hatred and idiocy
to feel shame anyway. Suffice it to say, American liberalism defied all odds
Saturday night and somehow managed to reach an even lower low than the last low
it reached. Liberalism is a religion of contempt and envy; each day
it sinks deeper into moral oblivion, and upon Scalia’s death it plunged to new
and terrifying depths.
What made the elation of liberals so
sickening and grotesque wasn’t just the fact that they were delighting over a
man’s death, but why. This a crucial detail. Those looking to mitigate
the guilt of liberals by drawing irrelevant comparisons have pointed out
that conservatives have themselves allegedly reacted inappropriately in similar
situations; many argued that, for instance, right-wingers celebrated Ted
Kennedy’s passing. But these two scenarios are quite distinct when you
consider the motivations behind them.
Ted Kennedy — if this is
the equivalence we’re settling on — was a drunken bully. He was
deeply corrupt, scandal-plagued, and so lacking in courage and character that
he left a woman to drown to death after driving her over a bridge. He was also
a staunch opponent of the Constitution, the rule of law, and anything
resembling the principles that lay at the foundation of this country. He was so
cowardly that, for political reasons, he became a radical advocate of abortion
despite knowing it to be a terrible evil. He left death, corruption and
deceit in his wake, and his legacy will be forever marked by crime, exploitation
and his active endorsement of child murder and other atrocities.
Though these sad truths obviously do
not mean we should take pleasure in his death, they do lend a certain context
to any conservatives who let their anger get the better of them when he
departed a few years ago. For Scalia, the context is very different. Scalia
was, objectively speaking, an honorable, honest, courageous man. Moreover, he
was right. I’m not going to say he was right about everything he ever
said — nobody is, although Scalia likely came closer than
most — but he took truthful, important, noble stands on a whole
host of decisive issues. He stood for the rule of law, for
the Constitution, for human life and for the family.
He was right. These were
the right positions. Not right in my opinion or in his opinion, just
right. Correct. True. So when liberals hate Scalia, their hatred is made all
the more reprehensible and absurd because they hate him for being right and
for being courageous and for being decent. It’s like the
difference between hating Osama bin Laden and hating Mother Teresa
(many liberals do in fact have more hatred for Mother Teresa). We
shouldn’t hate anyone, but if you lapse into hating a man like bin Laden, it
just shows you are a human being who struggles to mentally separate his
numerous wretched deeds from his humanity. I think, in context, it’s
understandable if one were to lose that internal battle on occasion.
But if you hate Mother Teresa, it
means, rather than hating evil and failing to properly distinguish the evil act
from the evildoer, you actually hate goodness. And you hate goodness so much
that you hate anyone who does what is good. In other words, the man who
hates bin Laden at least hates him because he hates evil, but the man who hates
Mother Teresa hates her because he loves evil. There is no moral
equivalence here.
Liberals celebrating Scalia’s death
aren’t just celebrating death, but evil. They aren’t just wrong in what they do
and say, but in the reason why they do and say it. They hate a man
because he protected the law, justice, human life, marriage and truth. They
hate him for his rightness, and they’re happy he’s dead so that wrongness may
win. That’s what makes this all so demented.
There are 11 months until we have a
new president, praise the good Lord. That means Senate Republicans must spend
11 months rejecting Obama’s Supreme Court nominations. They’re saying now they’ll hold the line, but forgive me
if I feel some skepticism. I’d love to believe they’ll hold the line, but I
can’t quite get past the unfortunate detail that they’ve never held the line on
anything.
If that’s going to suddenly
change — and it must — they have to be prepared for a
bloody, dangerous battle. Obama will likely put their heads in a vice,
politically speaking, by picking a nominee who’s “mainstream” and
“moderate” and has some tenuous connection to the Republican Party. It will all
be a ruse, of course. There is no possible way — literally zero
chance — that Obama nominates a constitutionalist judge with a record
of defending life and liberty. Whoever Obama picks will be pro-abortion,
pro-gay marriage, pro-big government, anti-gun and pro-judicial activism. That
means whoever he picks will be unacceptable. There is no point in saying, “Yes,
but what if he makes a good pick?” He won’t. Certainly we’ll be told
it’s a good pick; we’ll be told the pick is “appealing to both sides,”
“non-partisan,” so on and so on, but that will be a lie. The only thing that
should be appealing to our side is another Scalia, and he’s not going to put
another Scalia on the bench. It won’t happen.
Yet we need another Scalia. Not
want. Not hope for. Not in a perfect world. Need. If the
Democrats succeed in establishing a full blown liberal
court — leaving only Alito and Thomas as the reliable conservatives,
with Roberts playing the part when he feels like it — the
consequences will be unspeakable. Overturning Roe v. Wade will be out of the
question for another generation, signing the death warrant of millions of
yet-to-be-conceived children. States that have succeeded in passing laws and
regulations curtailing the procedure will eventually be overruled by judicial
fiat. Meanwhile, of course, states will never be freed from the requirement
that they recognize the court’s perverse and unconstitutional redefinition of
marriage. Worse, when the government moves to coerce churches into performing
gay “marriages,” the Supreme Court will be there to officially codify the
oppression into law, finally eradicating religious liberty in America once and
for all.
Go down the line through every
amendment, look at every liberty detested by leftists (which is most of
them) — free speech, gun rights, etc. — and wave goodbye
should the court fall entirely into the hands of anti-Constitutional progressive activists.
If the high court runs irreversibly left, you might as well take the
Constitution out of the National Archives Building in D.C. and throw it into a
raging dumpster fire. It’s gone anyway. Finished. Maybe it’s been finished
for quite some time, but this will remove whatever vestiges of
constitutionalism still remained covertly embedded into our system. It will be
a day more disastrous than any you’ve ever seen; a joyful occasion for
progressives, abortionists, homosexual activists, the national media, gun
control lobbyists and bureaucrats, but a catastrophe for
patriotic Americans.
So Republicans must fight this one
with all they have. Whatever it costs. Whatever political capital they forfeit.
Whatever they put on the line, including their careers. It doesn’t matter. This
right here is a hill to die on. No, it won’t be easy. Democrats were
already coming out of the woodwork moments after Scalia died to preemptively
slander any Republican who might try to protect America from the uncontrollable
tyranny of a hard-left Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton said Saturday
night — with a straight face, somehow — Republicans would
be “dishonoring the Constitution” if they try to
prevent it from being continuously molested from now into eternity.
There’s going to be a lot of that. There’s going to be a full year of that. But
it doesn’t matter. They can say what they want, cry all the tears they want,
issue as many indignant statements as they want, but when it comes down to it,
Republicans still have the power. And for once in their lives, they’d better
use it.
Liberals would do the exact same
thing if the shoe were on the other foot. Can you imagine
them approving a pro-life constitutionalist less than a year before a
presidential election, just because they care so much about “honoring the
Constitution”? Please. Does anyone actually believe that? Do liberals actually
expect us to believe they believe what they’re saying right now? All of
a sudden they think immediately approving Supreme Court nominations is some
kind of solemn duty of the Senate? Where were these “dishonoring the
Constitution” lectures back when Democrats were dragging Robert Bork and
Clarence Thomas into the town square and assassinating their character in front
of the jeering hordes? Democrats don’t just block Republican
nominations, they devour them. They rip them to shreds. They
pulverize them into dust.
And these are the people who would confirm a Republican
nomination during an election year? Stop it. God, himself, could yell
down from the heavens commanding Democrats to approve a conservative
Supreme Court pick under these circumstances and still they would refuse.
In fact, they’d launch a campaign of character assassination against the
Almighty and then refuse.
Everyone knows this to be true.
Everyone. Everyone on the other side of this knows they would do exactly what
the Republicans are saying they’ll do. The only difference is Democrats would actually
do it, whereas with Republicans I am not nearly as sure. That’s why I’m making
my position on this very clear: If Republicans fail in this
fight — the most important political fight they have ever faced, with
the fate of the law itself hanging in the balance — it will be an
unthinkable treason. I will leave the party forever and never return. If they
cannot stand firm now, they are as much enemies of America as their Democratic
counterparts.
Not every fight is worth fighting,
but some are worth fighting to the death. This is one of those fights. And
failure will never be forgiven or forgotten.
It ought to go without saying, but
many things that ought to go without saying still need to be said these days:
The priority now among conservatives — and this should have been the
priority all along — is to nominate a conservative. That is, a
conservative who can be trusted to find, nominate and fight to
approve a Scalia-caliber Supreme Court justice. If you do not
understand how important this is, then you simply do not understand enough
about your country to justify voting in the first place. You should stay
home, read a few books and maybe consider joining us at the polls in 2020.
Whatever else you care
about — immigration, foreign policy, taxes, whatever — it
won’t matter if we become a country where the rule of law is permanently
supplanted by the whims of bureaucrats and judges, and human life and basic
human liberties have been permanently and irreversibly suppressed, defiled, and
redefined. Yes, that is already our condition in this country, but our job as
voters is to elect someone who will fight to correct the situation. There
are many theaters in the war to reclaim America, but one of the central
political battlegrounds is the Supreme Court. And now we know the next
president will have at least one seat to fill.
We cannot afford to screw this up.
There is too much at stake.
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