Another Good Man Gone

Justice Antonin Scalia, RIP

Justice Antonin Scalia, the most conservative and intelligent Supreme Court Justice, was found dead in his bed Saturday morning, his bed clothes unwrinkled and with a pillow over his head.  He was a guest at an upscale Texas hunting resort with several others at the time of his passing.  When I first head the news, I resisted the urge to jump to conspiracy conclusions, but as reports of this most unusual and certainly suspicious event continue to come out, one must look at it in the harsh light of day.  I have read this plot line in more than one fictional political suspense novel, and while life can indeed imitate art, one is nonetheless left with a high degree of disbelief.  Here's the narrative so far.  One Cinderela Guevara, a local Democrat judge, declared his death one of "natural causes,' in absentia and without viewing the body.  Myocardial infarction simply means the heart stopped.  As it naturally would in cases of suffocation or drug overdose.  Hmm.  Yet neither autopsy nor toxicology tests were done, and we must take it solely on faith - from political opponents, no less - that the cause of death was of natural causes.  He was 79 after all, and heavy set, and suffered chronic aliments, we're reminded.   OK, don't we all at that age "suffer chronic ailments"?  And we don't simply die of unknown causes in our sleep.  But we're not conservative justices on the Supreme Court, are we?  

No matter what the circumstances of his death truly are we may never know.  But the impact is real and immediate, and a powerful pivotal figure on the nation's highest court, a friend and defender of the Founders' original intent of the Constitution, with a docket of significant cases coming up, suddenly and unexpectedly dies, and we're led to believe that there's nothing to see here.  And that an unpopular, far left anti-American president has an opportunity to nominate Scalia's replacement before his term ends in a few months.  No coincidence at all, I'm sure.

Now it's up to the Senate to approve or reject any Supreme Court nominee the Kenyan may suggest, and it's a given that he will find the most objectionable candidate he can find to nominate.  If Mitch McConnell doesn't get this right and a far left regressive liberal is appointed, the court will be swung to the left for as long as Ruth Bader Ginsberg lives.  The damage to the nation will be immediate.  And the republic may not survive that for long.