Right Wing Group Spending $1 Million On This Ad To Block Obama From Replacing Scalia

Group that was created to ensure all presidential Supreme Court nominees get a vote in the Senate now opposes allowing Obama to even nominate a SCOTUS justice.

The Judicial Crisis Network claims it is spending at least $1 million on an advertising campaign aimed at ensuring not only President Barack Obama does not get to place another justice on the Supreme Court, but that he isn’t even allowed to put forth a nominee.

Here’s the insidiously dishonest ad:

“It’s ‘We the People.’ Sometimes the politicians forget that,” the ad dishonestly proposes, given that We the People don’t get to nominate Supreme Court justices. “The Supreme Court has a vacancy and your vote in November is your only voice. Sen. Chuck Grassley agrees: the American people should decide. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about your voice. You choose the next president, the next president chooses the next justice. Call Sen. Chuck Grassley. Thank him for letting the people decide.”

First of all, as every elementary school student knows, the President nominates all Supreme Court justices. There is no law or even unwritten law that he should hold open a seat on the nation’s highest court so the next president can nominate someone, and so the people’s voices can be heard, as the Judicial Crisis Network claims. The people’s voices were heard when they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and when they re-elected him by a historic margin in 2012. 

But here’s what’s truly offensive. 

As Right Wing Watch points out, “during the George W. Bush administration the Judicial Crisis Network was called the Judicial Confirmation Network and that its stated mission was to ensure that ‘the confirmation process for all judicial nominees is fair and that every nominee sent to the full Senate receives an up or down vote.'” 

In their ad, the Judicial Crisis Network says, this “isn’t about Republicans and Democrats.”

But given that Carrie Severino, the Judicial Crisis Network’s chief counsel and policy director, rushed to the defense of Justice Scalia when in December he made an offensive and racially-charged claim – that affirmative action actually harms Black people by allowing them into schools that are too fast for them” – perhaps this is about something else entirely.

Severino has also shown she has a special animus for President Obama as well. A few quotes:

This president, who has shown such contempt for the Constitution and the laws, is the last person who should be appointing [Scalia’s] successor.

This President has been brazen about his willingness to take action that is normally reserved to Congress, the fact that the Court added the constitutional question means that some justices recognized that this is not a run of the mill act of prosecutorial discretion, but a novel and controversial power grab.

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported, “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.”

Little wonder why.

 

Image: Screenshot via YouTube
Hat tip: Joe.My.God.