Trump in the Oval Office receiving the latest updates from Capitol Hill on negoti
Trump in the Oval Office receiving the latest updates from Capitol Hill on negotiOfficial White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

What can they do — whine? Threaten to pack the Court? Impeach President Trump for acting under his Constitutional duty and with his Constitutional authority?

They already have been whining for four years. Nothing new there. Hillary Clinton still tells Americans, four years after having lost, that she won the 2016 presidential election. Likewise, they have been threatening to pack the Court since the successful nomination of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. So nothing new there. And they already impeached President Trump, even passing around specially ordered gold souvenir pens to prove it.

Nancy Pelosi has no arrows left in her quiver. That is why the Democrats now are quivering.

What is 87-year-old Dianne Feinstein going to do as the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee? Herself a fallen Catholic and graduate of San Francisco’s Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, she lambasted Professor Amy Coney Barrett, prior to the law professor’s ascent to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for being Catholic: “The dogma lives loudly within you.” Yes, and the leftist dogma of the fallen Catholic lives loudly within Feinstein. Good. Go ahead, Dianne, try that one again.

Or Mazie Hirono, who does deserve begrudging respect for being the hundredth most brilliant United States Senator in all of America — what anti-Catholic tirade will she try this time? She already has leveraged her seat on that Senate Judiciary Committee to ply her religious bigotry against yet another Catholic, Judge Brian Buescher, for being a member of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal order. Hirono is a Buddhist, if that matters. Judge Buescher solidly passed the Senate 51-40 anyway, and he now is a federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska.

And then there is Kamala. Ah, Kamala, The lady who entered politics and sewed her political oats by publicly cavorting for more than a year with California Democrat Kingmaker Willie Brown, thirty-one years her senior and very publicly married. While Kamala posed in revealing photos at soirees and other social events with Brown, acting as Willie’s very public plaything for nearly two years, being rewarded with plum paronage jobs and coveted political introductions in exchange for benefits, Kingmaker Brown’s wife had this to say:

“Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in [as mayor of San Francisco], I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.”

So let us watch Harris play the morality card again with this one. She already is on record as having attacked that same Judge Buescher for his Catholicism, too, cross-examining him for being associated with the two-million-member, 137-year-old Catholic fraternal organization.

The reality is that the Democrats are stuck in the creek without a paddle. Will Christine Blasey Ford be resuscitated, this time with repressed memories of a lesbian attack at the University of Notre Dame law school, where Judge Barrett recorded a stellar teaching record both as a scholar and as a mentor? Will Michael Avenatti, another Democrat hero of Supreme Court nomination battles, hold a prison press conference in Nike athletic shoes bearing the names of Lebron James or Colin Kaepernick to tell us that he has surprise witnesses waiting to testify?

Americans who are fair and real recognize that Notre Dame’s Amy Coney Barrett is an excellent jurist worthy of sitting on the United States Supreme Court. It is about time that other great law schools besides Harvard and Yale get that recognition. She has all the credentials needed — and more, having just established herself in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Yes, the Democrats are upset that Ruth Ginsburg did not have the prescience of a Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan-nominee who humbly stepped aside during a Republican Administration to make way for a like-minded successor, Brett Kavanaugh, who had clerked for him. Ginsburg chose not to step down during the Obama Years, even though she was urged and even pressed to do so. In a Mother Jones piece two years ago, the left’s frustration was palpable:

The calls for Ginsburg to step down began in 2011 when Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and former clerk to the late Thurgood Marshall, wrote a piece in The New Republic gently urging Ginsburg, then 78, to retire while Obama was in office. . . . Kennedy was publicly airing private concerns among Democrats that it could be Ginsburg’s last chance to be replaced by a Democrat. “Justices Ginsburg and Breyer have enriched the nation with long, productive, admirable careers,” he wrote. “Those, like me, who admire their service might find it hard to hope that they will soon leave the Court — but service comes in many forms, including making way for others.”

That same article cited a December 2013 article in National Journal titled, “Justice Ginsburg: Resign Already!and a 2014 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that opined “I do not minimize how hard it will be for Justice Ginsburg to step down from a job that she loves and has done so well since 1993. But the best way for her to advance all the things she has spent her life working for is to ensure that a Democratic president picks her successor.”

Ginsburg rolled the dice, doing her daily push-up, and they have come up snake eyes.

If the shoes now were on Democrat feet, they would be doing the same, naming a new Supreme Court nominee even the day before presidential elections. That is how the process works. If a party has the White House and controls the Senate, they get the Supreme Court justice of their choice in the door. If not, not. All the Republican speechifying against Obama nominating Judge Merrick Garland at the end of Obama’s Wasted Decade was mere posturing. The bottom line was that the Republicans held the Senate majority, and Obama’s nominee was not going to get a hearing. In retrospect, that was a much more kind and genteel approach than to import a fabricated defamatory claim of teenage rape to assassinate Garland’s name and character in the presence of his wife and two daughters.

In 2018 the Republicans expanded their Senate majority, boosted in great measure by American reactions to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and subsequent hearings. Mike Braun ousted Joe Donnelly in Indiana by six points. Rick Scott ousted 18-year incumbent Bill Nelson in Florida. Josh Hawley knocked out Claire McCaskill in Missouri by six points. Kevin Cramer clobbered Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota by eleven points. Marsha Blackburn romped over once-popular Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen by eleven points. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, read the coal leaves, and he barely survived with 49.57 percent of the votes because he jumped aisles and voted in favor of Kavanaugh.

That was the last popular referendum on President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations. It gave Trump an expanded Senate majority to proceed now to name Amy Coney Barrett to the high court. If Democrats are angry and quivering, they have no one to blame but the notorious Ginsburg who chose to hold onto her seat beyond 2016 at age 83.

Yes, now they threaten to pack the Court if they get the chance to do so. That is because they have owned that Court for so long, nearly a century, that they believe they truly own it by Divine Right, the only aspect of divinity they still regard.

Whenever Republicans won the White House this past century, the Democrats still got liberal justices from them. Eisenhower gave them Earl Warren and William Brennan. Nixon gave them Harry Blackmun. Ford gave them John Paul Stevens. Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, both of whom sided often with the liberal wing. The first Bush gave them David Souter. The second Bush named John Roberts and almost Harriet Miers. The Supreme Court has seen nearly a century of Republican Christmas presents for Democrats, no matter the season, and the left does not now have the capacity to play by the same rules that have frustrated Republican conservative voters since the Franklin Roosevelt years.

Fair-minded Republicans heartily will endorse Sen. Susan Collins’s decision to vote against the Barrett nomination. She is in a tough reelection race in Maine, and she proved her mettle when Kavanaugh was on the line. Lisa Murkowski, who never seems to get her bearings straight (yes, intended), is a matter for Alaskan Republicans to decide. Had Murkowski not broken ranks, Cory Gardner could have joined Collins as a “nay” in the face of his tough reelection effort; instead, he is taking one for the team, and he will be rewarded. Mitt Romney, who is supporting the Barrett nomination despite desperately despairingly despising President Trump, reflects the overwhelming justice underlying the nomination of this new justice: it is simply Constitutionally appropriate.

The Democrats are left with nothing but to whine, to threaten, to quiver, and to throw “Pack the Court” tantrums. If they ever get the chance and do that, they will rue that day as they now rue the day that Harry Reid unilaterally ended the filibuster rule on judicial selections. If they add six judges to the Court, then the next Republican will add ten, and then they will add fifteen, and eventually there will be a hundred or two hundred Supreme Court justices for life. Except for those humble enough to face their own mortalities and wise enough to step down when they should have.

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com .