Leave the Scalia Chair Vacant

It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him.

But no one can replace Justice Scalia.

He was a giant among jurists. For a third of a century, he led the conservative wing of the high court, creating a new school of judicial thought called “originalism.”

But originalism is not conservatism, which, in the judicial era that preceded Scalia, often meant court decisions that “conserved” the radical social revolution Earl Warren’s court had imposed upon us.

Scalia believed in going back to the founding documents of the republic and discerning from them the original meaning and intent of the framers.

He would look at the purpose of the authors of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and post-Civil War amendments, and conclude that it was an absurdity to discover there, or read into them, a constitutional right to have anRepublicans should tell our “transformative” president that his days of transforming America are over, that he will not be remaking the court into a bastion of the left after his departure, and that, while he has the right to nominate whom he wishes, the U.S. Senate will exercise its right to reject any nominee he sends up. If the court will then face many 4-4 decisions for the next year, so be it.

Given the divisions on the court and balance of power, and the disposition of liberal justices to impose upon the nation an ideology that would never be embraced democratically, the Republican Party is almost duty-bound to oppose any Obama nominee.

What kind of Supreme Court do the American people wish to have? That is a question to be decided in 2016 — not by a lame-duck president, but by the American electorate in November.

Does the nation want an activist judiciary to remake America into a more liberal society, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor would like to see it remade?

Or do the American people want a more constitutional court that returns power to the people and their elected representatives?

Let’s have it out.

Republicans should tell the American people that when they vote in November they will be deciding not only the next president, not only which party shall control Congress, they will be deciding what kind of Supreme Court their country should have. Which is as it should be.

If the GOP can’t win this argument, they have lost the country.

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