Senator McTurtle showed his usual restraint upon learning of Justice Antonin Scalia's demise. He followed the customary mud hole mourning period of 4 minutes before turning the still warm corpse into a political football.
His kick might be a little short and a lot wide, but that really doesn't matter. Yertle is the master of all he can see and no one will fill that vacancy but he!
There's no way he's going to let the champion of modern conservative legal thinking, the hero of original intent constitutionalists, be replaced by 3/5 of a president. That's a constitution joke, look it up.
The late supreme court justice is probably having quite a laugh over the argle bargle from the swamp that a sitting president not fill his vacant seat. If nothing else, Justice Scalia was a man with a wicked sense of humor who would savor the irony like a twenty dollar cigar.
Someone who was best pals with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn't be all bad. The legal opposites were a duo most modern politicos can't comprehend. When questioned, Scalia once said they agreed "on a whole lot of stuff, Ruth is only bad really on the knee jerk stuff."
Personally, I'd say the Notorious RBG is the right one on the knee jerk stuf, but everyone's entitled to their own opinion.
So instead of actually mourning a giant of the Court, the Republicans are in deep panic mode over the loss of a fairly dependable knee jerk vote. The original intent wing of the party are showing their true colors and tying themselves into knots trying to avoid the explicit intent of the document they swear to uphold.
Speculation regarding the Pretender in Chief's potential nominee is rampant. No matter who Obama nominates, the Party of No O will oppose it. Making up the intent as you go is the McConnell way.
The real question in the midst of all this mess isn't who gets to fill the empty judicial chair. Not at all. The big question is how is Clarence Thomas going to know how to vote?
According to Supreme Court voting records compiled in 2014, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas were in agreement on 91% of cases before the court. That's fairly amazing. I can't believe there were 9% of cases they disagreed on.
But more interesting than that, is that Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg were in agreement on 70% of cases. That's the darling justice of the conservative base and the darling justice of the liberal base agreeing on 7 out of 10 opportunities to argue.
Do you think maybe they didn't watch cable news? Did they somehow not get the message from our own Yertle that there will be no agreeing with the enemy? How could they not listen to Senator McTurtle?
Maybe because turtles are humorless and can't carry a tune.
Imagine what the last 8 years would have been like if Yertle had followed Antonin and Ruth's lead instead of wallowing in his own swamp of calculated governmental dysfunction. His assumptions are likely to make a lot more donkeys than elephants at the polls come November.