Liberals practicing the very method of interpretation on the Constitutional procedure to replace Scalia that #Scalia despised

I have already addressed the Constitutional requirements of the President and Senate in regard to filling the now vacant seat on the Supreme Court in my previous post: The President is clearly obliged to nominate a replacement for Scalia, but the Senate is not obliged to confirm it.

There really are people out there who are silly enough to argue that the Senate is required to consent to whoever the president nominates. But that is clearly meaningless. If someone is required to consent, then it is not consent. Consent necessarily involves willful agreement. That's what the word, from the French, literally means: to feel together. If consent were required, then it would not be necessary at all. If that's what the Constitution meant, then it would just have said that the President gets to appoint. Period. End of story. 

Isn't it ironic that the people who want the Senate to roll over and play dead when Obama tries to replace Scalia use the very technique of textual interpretation that Scalia despised when applied to the Constitution (or anywhere else)? 

To a textualist, the meaning of the language governing the replacement of Supreme Court justices is fairly clear. But liberals think they have the right to make words mean whatever they want them to mean. "Marriage." "Family." "Child" (the literal meaning of the Latin fetus)—and to enforce their made-up meanings on everyone else.

I can just imagine what Scalia would have said about this, and it isn't pretty.

The Mitch Factor: How the Senate can block a recess appointment by Obama

In the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia's death, some of the talk on the news shows has been about what the President and the Senate can and can't do in regard to Supreme Court appointments. According to Article II, Section II of the Constitution--the Article that outlines the powers of the executive branch, the president ...

shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, ... Judges of the supreme Court ... whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.

Note that nothing here says that the Senate has to let Obama make an appointment. Obama can attempt it, and the Senate has ways under their rules, to block it. Nothing in this section prevents the Senate from doing it.

But then there's a provision that looks very ominous from a conservative perspective:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

This is the provision that has gotten some attention in the discussion over Scalia's successor, an option some are calling the "nuclear option": Obama can simply make a recess appointment to replace him and the Senate can't do a thing about it. 

But there are three things about this. The first is that it could have negative political consequences. All those liberals who are now talking about the obligation the Senate has to allow a debate on the President's nominee would have to do a complete about face, since the nuclear option here would prevent a debate as well. But, then again, liberals do about faces all the time.

Secondly, such an appointment would appear to be temporary: "by granting Commission which shall expire at the End of their next Session." So, even if Obama did make a recess appointment, the Senate would still have to confirm it, before a certain time. If Obama tries to do this, he will have to do it between Dec. 18 and the first week of January, 2017. But if he does this, the appointment will expire with about a week to spare at the end of the year, which is when the session ends. So even in this case, the appointment would only be for about a year. This is still bad for conservatives, but not quite as bad.

But it is the final consideration here which is the most significant because it is the most likely to actually happen. It is the way, which a friend of mine who is in a position to know these issues points out, that will prevent Obama from making any kind of recess appointment. It is this: the Senate simply does not go into recess. This is completely under the control of Sen. Mitch McConnell. He has to know this--and surely has already figured it out.

McConnell checkmates Obama. Watch it happen.

The Supreme Court is NOT "balanced" after Scalia's death

Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN this morning what liberals keep saying: that with Scalia's death the U.S. Supreme Court is evenly split between liberals and conservatives. And since it is now evenly split, the decision of who to replace him with is a debate over the ideological balance of a currently balanced Court. And since Obama is president and the Constitution gives him the right to appoint justices, he's got the right to tip it any way he wants.

Of course, this is nonsense. There is no "balanced Court" now. This is a fiction being pedaled by people who themselves want to push the Court further to the left than it already is. 

The Balanced Court Thesis is premised on the assumption that Justice Anthony Kennedy is a conservative.

This is the man who wrote the Obergefell decision which deprived states of the right to define marriage, a right they have always possessed and which was overturned in the face of countervailing precedent and on the absurd ground that the 14th Amendment required it. It was as politically liberal a decision as the Court has ever handed down. And it is far from Kennedy's only such decision.

The Court is not balanced 4-4, it is at least left-leaning and on many of the most important issues, it is imbalanced 5-3 in favor of liberals. Conservatives need to start pointing this out.