The Senate Republicans who are instantly rewriting some of the most basic of constitutional law in order to keep the twice-elected President Obama from appointing the successor to Antonin Scalia should be impeached. Of course, they won't be, the same document that couldn't be clearer about President Obama's responsibility in naming someone to fill the vacancy and their responsibility to confirm or reject his choice also makes it a practical impossibility to punish them for breaking their oath of office for baldly partisan reasons, depending on the widespread racism of their parties members and the racism of the media which is their mouthpiece.
Such instant and extra-constitutional revision as Senators, McConnell, Grassley, Ayotte, etc. are engaged in is the reality of "origialism" such as it was throughout the entire history of that aristocratic fraud on the American People. Scalia and his fellow thugs have never let the text, the legislative history or anything else stop them when they wanted to make it up to their own benefit.
Such bald partisanship has been on full display in the Supreme Court during Scalia's membership, in its most obvious and raw form in the choice of the five Republican appointees who installed George W. Bush, something for which there was no recourse and for which none of those thugs were ever so much as made to answer for. The media certainly never made any of them answer for them, Sandra Day O'Connor, who was widely quoted as being dismayed by the announcement that Al Gore had won Florida on election night because she wanted to retire and she didn't want a Democrat to name her successor has never had to answer for her signing on to the unprecedented and baldly partisan installation of the loser of the election.
There is a story that when the greatest logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel, was being sworn in as a citizen of the United States, his friends, including Albert Einstein were dismayed to hear that he'd discovered a flaw in the Constitution that could be used to turn the United States into a dictatorship. Through a combination of good luck in the judge handling Gödel's swearing in was a friend of Einstein and careful handling, the great logician never explained his discovery, which seems to be lost. I'm surprised, considering how much of the guarantees of such basic features as checks and balances depend on that fragile and rare holding of the powerful and wealthy, honor, the self-interest and corruption of the press which is imagined by Jeffersonian romantics to expose evil, that Gödel could only find one way. If you want an example of the latter, listen to the hagiographic bull shit issuing from the allegedly liberal and objective media organ, NPR this morning. If you want an example of the former, consider that even as Scalia was issuing decisions that there is no right for innocent people to not be executed in excruciating pain, Ruth Bader Ginsburg considered him her "best buddy".
Depending on the "honor" of the powerful and wealthy, depending on the honor and honesty of the media, the 18th century Constitution has potential to be a minefield of opportunities to impose despotism on the country. The staffing of courts with the good old boys and girls of the Ivy League class universities, those who have enjoyed the privileges and benefits of exactly the affluent top through that educational and professional history make it all the more likely that this is the way it's going to go. For whatever virtues Ruth Bader Ginsburg may have, that she was able to be chums with a man who wrote the decisions and dissents that Scalia did makes me wonder how she thought of the people who died, who were deprived of their rights by her good chum. I don't think I'd have been able to sustain a friendship with someone who did that to real people in real life while enjoying the privileges of office as he did it. But, then, I only went to public, land-grant universities.
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