James Wilson: About That Supreme Court Nominee
President Donald Trump has a historic opportunity to nominate a second Supreme Court justice in as many years, and the country is in spasm that can only be described as an appendectomy on the way or a birth in process, depending.
The left is hysterical that their precious right to kill unborn children may be snatched away, and still in shock that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not in the White House protecting that right from the horrible crusaders for life. The right is in a paroxysm of joy for the same reasons.
Meanwhile the left trots out the fictions as vicious as they are dishonest.
First we see the articles about the evils of “packing the court” and “settled law.”
“Packing the Court” is a 1930s term referring to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 effort to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could appoint fans of his New Deal policies. The existing court had declared several of his measures unconstitutional and he planned to add enough new justices to make immunize them from judicial review.
Although the Constitution neither authorizes nor forbids expanding SCOTUS, all parties agreed it required congressional action; Congress never got on board and even FDR’s vice president publicly opposed the move prior to its death by apathy.
The bottom line is believing that Trump will attempt to appoint a justice whose expected viewpoint on life he likes is not even remotely similar to FDR’s effort — and the authors of these deceptive pieces are well aware of it.
What would one expect Trump to do, by the way — appoint someone whose views he despises?
“Settled law” is just another deliberate deception. Plessy v. Ferguson was the 1896 SCOTUS decision that enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimized Jim Crow laws throughout the South and some parts of the North as well. Dred Scott was the monumentally worse 1857 decree that black people were not citizens of the United States and therefore could be hunted and killed if they should escape slavery. Both were “settled law” until they were overturned — one by war and the other by the same court that once established it.
The abortion ban that was “settled law” for a century was overturned by Roe v Wade. Law — any law — is settled only until unsettled. Deal with it.
What is truly settled is the constitutional prohibition against applying a religious test to nominees for any government office in the United States. Yet liberal leader after progressive ideologue has stated they will not vote to confirm an avowedly Christian justice. That is a religious test and it is just plain not allowed.
Okay, but what about us conservatives — us Christian conservatives – who think our ship is coming in? Are we not just as hypocritically unscrupulous as the liars on the left? We decry — and rightly so — the agenda of the left to prevent at all costs another pro-life justice on the Supreme Court, and for which they are happy to unconstitutionally attacking the faith of nominees. But are we not just as agendized?
Don’t get me wrong. The right to life is the first inalienable right received from God and declared in our Declaration of Independence, from which our Constitution is derived. A good judicial candidate honors that reality. But are we Christian voters praying and lobbying for a constructionist judge who includes life at the top of his values, or are we demanding what we want because we think it is somehow our turn to win? Are we operating as citizens of Heaven on earth, or are we still of the mindset so many evangelicals displayed in 2012 who refused to support Mitt Romney, the Mormon, and so gave the country four more years of Obama.
This just in — it is never our turn to win in the secular political sense; it is always our turn to surrender to the God,who works all things together for good. Trump is not tasked with selecting a worship leader, much less someone to make us feel good. He is to nominate a constitutionalist whose faithfulness to the Constitution includes respect for life across the board. What matters is not whether we get what we want but on whose side we serve.
No religious test means no religious test. If God cannot trust us to play by the secular rules that reflect his Law, He cannot be expected to trust us with the big stuff. Our job is to render to Caesar — as people of revelation and wisdom — what rightfully belongs to Caesar and to God all other things.
This one belongs to Caesar.
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