OPINION:
President Trump knows he will have to name someone — preferably Judge Amy Coney Barrett — to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A brilliant liberal jurist and close friend of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Mrs. Ginsburg, 87, died at home Friday of complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer.
If Mr. Trump doesn’t name a Ginsburg replacement next week, his base will blast him with a fury beyond anything hell has to offer.
He seeks reelection on the same pledge that helped win him the White House in 2016.
He said he would make the federal judiciary a redoubt for legal minds that base their interpretation of the Constitution on what its architects meant, not what some justice wishes the Framers meant.
Naming a replacement will almost surely see more — and more virulent — street violence around the country by America’s totalitarian seditionists and the Democrats’ own out-of-control left wing.
Sad to say, that which denigrates America’s image — rioting, arson, looting and shootings — will do some good by my possibly misguided lights. That is to say it will help Mr. Trump and many other Republican candidates on Nov. 3.
Law, order and fear of Democrats’ indifference to lawlessness will become even more central to this general election.
With a 53-seat Senate majority and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already on board for confirmation in the final elections stretch, Mr. Trump has the votes to confirm.
Even if wobbly Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah go rogue, Vice President Mike Pence would break a 50-50 tie.
Democrats and the violent left are determined to make any confirmation hearings even uglier than they were in 2018 for the most recent Trump Supreme Court appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The president’s choosing a woman may make Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats a bit more restrained in the vileness of their attacks on her.
Naming a Catholic woman who is a graduate of — and professor at — Notre Dame Law School (and not some Ivy League school) will play well with most Americans, not just the Trump base.
Mrs. Barrett also puts a broad smile on that base with her hardline on immigration, the right to life, the right to bear arms and preservation of the rights of male defendants accused of sexual crimes.
Her opposition to the death penalty will please some but not most conservatives. It’s not a deal breaker with either side.
Sen. Kamala Harris, the Dems’ vice presidential nominee who lied about Mr. Kavanaugh at his hearings, is among these often nasty, occasionally deceitful and in some cases dimly-lit Democrats on the Judiciary Committee:
Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Chris Coons of Delaware, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Cory Booker of New Jersey.
The president will have to name someone this coming week. Time is incredibly short. Confirmation hearings will have to take place before the Nov. 3 election.
If Joe Biden wins on Nov. 3 snd Mr. Trump gets his nominee confirmed after that, bitterness and anger among Democrats will reach an unhealthier degree than now, if that’s possible.
Imagine yourself a Democrat forced to see a Republican president getting to place his choice on the high court not in the middle of a presidential election campaign — which would be bad enough for Dems — but after the incumbent Republican has lost.
A big reason Mr. Trump won the electoral-college vote in 2016 was his promise to conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, that the federal judiciary would be hearth and home to Scalia acolytes, of whom Mrs. Barrett is one.
They took him at his word and he delivered by appointing 205 federal judges — that’s almost one out of every four federal judges on the bench today — and shifting 12 appeals courts to the right.
So far Mr. Trump has kept that word.
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