Trump should bring forward his Supreme Court Justice nominee without delay

Sep 23, 2020 by

by Martin Sewell, Archbishop Cranmer:

The death of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a significant event on a number of levels. It is, of course, a personal sadness for her family and friends; a loss, if not wholly unexpected, for those who admired her great forensic legal skills and the pioneering role she played as the second woman to be appointed to the US Supreme Court; and for some of the more unhinged partisans in American political life, it is apparently cataclysmic.

Whilst our friends at the BBC may not have quite reached that level of heightened reaction, it is plain from the way that they have covered the event, and perhaps more importantly looked at what happens next, that they are deeply worried that a more ‘conservative’ judge will be appointed by President Trump, whether now or after the election. One wonders if they have considered what ‘conservative’ might actually mean in the context of the Supreme Court.

The people of a country are made up of a blend of individual opinions, varied and opposed. They may be more or less authoritarian, more or less socially liberal, and have a variety of cultural assumptions which may conflict. The people – the demos – supporting and bound by the US Constitution, are particularly diverse in the USA, as the country is largely one of immigrants from a vast array of societies and backgrounds. Inevitably, their interests, in both senses of the word, will be divergent, and it was to this problem that the Founding Fathers put their minds.

Plainly, those men were not modern ‘progressives’: they easily overlooked the indigenous people of the continent which expanded vastly and mysteriously from the eastern seaboard which they inhabited within their 13 colonies. They were eurocentric men of the Enlightenment, with many of the virtues and some of the blind spots which that implies. Yesterday our eye went to the absence of reference to women’s rights; today it rests on a blind spot toward its slaves, yet what they produced has been a remarkably longstanding and flexible instrument with the capacity to grow with the country and into modernity.

Read here

Read also: With Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, America’s soul will be defined over abortion by Jonathon Van Maren, LifeSite

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