OPINION:
As we all now know, there is a Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose casket, as of this writing, is reposing in the Supreme Court. Former clerks, friends, and soon the president of the United States, will pay their respects. Next week Justice Ginsburg will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery. By that time Mr. Trump will have announced his nominee for her replacement.
And cities around America will erupt in fire.
That is, if liberals like former CNN host Reza Aslan, who tweeted “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f**cking thing down,” get their way. (This tweet, by the way, is still up.) Mr. Aslan, of course, is simply saying out loud a more extreme form of the same sentiment the Democratic Party is making in more bureaucratic fashion.
For instance, this past Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when pressed by George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” would not rule out a second impeachment push as a strategy to prevent Senate Republicans from voting on a nominee. After the inventiveness of Russiagate, who knows what charges House Democrats will now conjure to stop Mr. Trump. But it does not really matter.
Then there are the threats of repealing the filibuster and then expanding and packing the Supreme Court, insane propositions that would spell the end of our republic — and currently being bandied about by influential members of the liberal establishment. A race to the bottom if we’ve ever seen one.
All of this we should take seriously, but the point of it, at the moment, is to apply maximum pressure on the president and the GOP to forgo the nomination process until after the election. Under no circumstances should Mr. Trump cave to this pressure. Not only is it his constitutional right to appoint a new justice, his voters expect this from him. Moreover, in the unfortunate, but increasingly likely event — if Democratic rhetoric is anything to be believed — that we have a contested election, a Supreme Court unable to break a tie would throw America into chaos.
The good news is that a nominee will be presented in the coming days. What the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must now do is act decisively, irrespective of outside threats. This resoluteness in the face of mob mentality and extortionist threats is precisely the posture now needed and desperately wished for.
If Mr. Trump and the GOP are up to the task now, voters will reward them in November.
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