Within moments of President Trump’s announcement that he is nominating Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer came out fuming.
“Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish was that she not be replaced until a new president is installed. Republicans are poised to not only ignore her wishes, but to replace her with someone who could tear down everything that she built,” the New York senator wrote in his formal response to Barrett’s nomination. “I will strongly oppose this nomination.”
But the truth is that Democrats don’t care about Ginsburg’s preferences. Although they have clung on to this “dying wish” trope for the past week as they try to find something to levy a baseless allegation against whomever Trump chose, they’ve also completely insulted Ginsburg’s legacy, saying the quiet part out loud as they threaten to pack the Supreme Court despite the late justice’s specific guidance that court-packing is wrong.
Though a few Democratic presidential candidates endorsed the notion of court-packing, Joe Biden specifically won the nomination by appealing to a return to normalcy, explicitly rejecting the notion just last year. But now, top Democrats such as Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Jerry Nadler have claimed they will pack the courts if Republicans confirm Barrett.
When recently asked by the press if he’ll go along with the idea, Biden hedged, instead deflecting about Trump.
Ginsburg reportedly claimed that she wanted her replacement to be voted on after the election, yes, but we have documented video of Ginsburg actively warning against court-packing.
“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” Ginsburg told NPR just last year. “If anything, [it] would make the court look partisan. It would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”
Schumer is happy to use the alleged word of a dead woman to advance political warfare and run roughshod over the Constitution, all while his party refuses to abide by an emphatic warning to preserve the court she gave her life to. This level of emotional terrorism isn’t just hypocritical, it’s downright cruel.
