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ANALYSIS

September 20, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 has raised the stakes of the 2020 presidential election even higher than they were before, with just weeks to go before election day.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised that the U.S. Senate will vote on President Donald Trump’s nominee. 

If the Senate does indeed vote, this will be the third Supreme Court vacancy President Donald Trump will fill – or attempt to fill – during his first term. 

Commenting on the widely-viewed video footage of leftists banging on the doors of the Supreme Court before Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in, “It was madness in Washington,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on her show The Ingraham Angle Friday night. Quipping that summer 2020 has been a “summer of love” filled with riots and civil unrest, she then grimly said, “I don’t know what the ‘fall of love’ is going to look like.”

During a rally in North Carolina on September 19, Trump said his nominee will be a woman. Ginsburg was the second woman to be nominated to the high court.

Amy Coney Barrett is often the first name pro-lifers bring up in the context of Trump’s next Supreme Court appointment, but she is far from the only possibility. Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven, became famous when Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) interrogated her about her Catholic faith during her confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. 

“The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein told Barrett, who at the time was a University of Notre Dame law professor.

On September 9, Trump released another list of people he’d consider nominating to the high court. Among them are pro-life Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Tom Cotton (R-AR), although it’s unlikely any of them will be nominated. 

Hawley tweeted Saturday morning that he will only vote to confirm Supreme Court nominees “who understand and acknowledge that Roe [v. Wade] was wrongly decided.”

In addition to Barrett, two female possibilities are Allison Jones Rushing and Barbara Lagoa. The former, who is evangelical, previously interned for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. The latter was the first Hispanic woman to be appointed as a Justice on the Supreme Court of Florida.

Rushing’s connection to ADF and her youth – she’s in her late 30s, a full 10 years younger than Barrett – make her a stalwart social conservative candidate. Lagoa is in her 50s, and does not seem to have much of a record on abortion, but her nomination could galvanize the swing voters of Florida to turn out for Trump once again.

Also on Trump’s new list of possible nominees is Sarah Pitlyk. Pitlyk, a Catholic, was part of the defense team for Center for Medical Progress head David Daleiden in Planned Parenthood’s case against him for exposing the abortion giant’s sale of organs from aborted babies. 

It is worth noting that Catholic Supreme Court justices, with the exceptions of Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, are far from guaranteed to rule on or express in their dissents support for the side of unborn children and natural law.

Retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic, infamously paved the way for legal recognition of homosexual unions, ultimately as “marriages.” 

Obama appointee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who always sides with the court’s liberal wing, including on abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism, is a non-practicing Catholic. 

Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh are also Catholic. The former sided with the abortion lobby in June Medical Services v. Russo this past summer and upheld pro-abortion, pro-contraception Obamacare. Although Kavanaugh dissented from Bostock v. Clayton County, which wrote transgenderism into 1964 civil rights law, he nevertheless praised its outcome, saying he merely disagreed with the court’s reasoning in getting there.

Justice Neil Gorsuch was also “raised Catholic,” according to CNN – and therefore presumably baptized Catholic – yet he authored the Court’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County

Three Republican senators whose votes will be crucial are Mitt Romney, who has become increasingly anti-Trump and liberal during his time in the Senate, and pro-abortion Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

Also of note: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) – Joe Biden’s running mate – is on the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is a key member of the Judiciary Committee. As of press time he has not yet shared his thoughts on the timing of a vote on a nominee, instead tweeting about finding a dead bird in his front yard.

Politico reported:

Several Senate Republicans in competitive elections — McSally and Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, both of whom were appointed to their seats — immediately called for the Senate to vote on Trump’s nominee to the court. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined them on Saturday, saying in a statement that he will support a Trump nominee. Other senators released statements praising Ginsburg’s life and service to the country, but did not say where they stood on replacing her prior to the presidential inauguration next January.

Supreme Court must ‘reckon with its own sins against human rights’

Pro-life and conservative leaders expressed their condolences to Ginsburg’s family and emphasized the significance of this moment in American history.  

“May God have mercy on her soul,” said John-Henry Westen, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of LifeSiteNews. “Justice Ginsburg was known for her friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a pro-life Catholic who attended the Traditional Latin Mass. We hope that his faith had an impact on her later in her life, and that she repented of her pro-abortion activism at the end.”

Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), commented, “CWA women pray for God’s comfort over Justice Ginsburg’s family. We appreciate her role as a trailblazer for women, even as we disagreed with her judicial philosophy. May she rest in peace.”

Nance continued, “At the same time, our happy warrior women are battle-tested and know what to expect from the left on this issue. They understand what is at stake when it comes to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we are ready to withstand the left’s radical attacks on any nominee. If there is one thing we learned from what they did to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, it is that it doesn’t matter who the nominee is, nor his or her record. What matters to the radical left is that it is President Donald Trump’s nominee. Not even truth mattered to them with the nomination of Kavanaugh.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said this is a “turning point.”

“We offer our sincere condolences to Justice Ginsburg’s children, grandchildren, extended family, friends, and colleagues,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of the Susan B. Anthony List. “This is a turning point for the nation in the fight to protect its most vulnerable, the unborn. The pro-life grassroots have full confidence that President Trump, Leader McConnell, Chairman Graham, and every pro-life senator will move swiftly to fill this vacancy.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said Ginsburg’s death underscores just how important the U.S. Supreme Court is. “The pro-life movement has been waiting since 1973 to reverse the callous and intellectually bankrupt decisions found in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Those two infamous cases have made the deaths of more than 60 million baby boys and baby girls possible and allowed a predatory abortion industry to end life through all [nine] months of pregnancy.” 

Live Action president and founder Lila Rose said the Supreme Court must “reckon with its own sins against human rights.”

“Like Dredd Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu, Roe v. Wade casts a dark shadow on America's justice system, which enshrines equal protection under the law for all people,” said Rose. “It is time for the Court to uphold the rights and dignity of preborn children guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. Because when the right to life is disregarded, all other constitutional rights fall prey to the abuses of arbitrary power and tyranny.”

Rose added:

As our President and Senate now look to the great responsibility of swiftly confirming a new justice, we the people must insist the Supreme Court uphold the principle of equal protection under the law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which declares that no person shall be deprived of life without due process. For nearly 50 years, the Supreme Court has twisted the U.S. Constitution to permit the lawless killing of 60 million children in the womb. Every day in our nation, 2,363 children with a beautiful future ahead are poisoned, dismembered, and suctioned to death by abortion. This is the greatest injustice of our day. It is time to end the bloodshed. We urge President Trump to ensure the next Supreme Court justice acknowledges that all human beings have the right to life – no matter their race, sex, age, size, or dependency status.

Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said:

Now, this is a moment we have been waiting for since the first state decriminalized abortion in 1968. This is the moment that President Trump’s decision can shift the Court away from its current pro-abortion bent. With this nominee, he can literally save millions of innocent lives throughout future generations and restore a respect for human life that has been deteriorating in our culture. It is likely the most important decision he will make as [p]resident.

Operation Rescue calls on President Trump to act quickly to select a pro-life nominee with an unshakable commitment to our founding principles.

We call on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold hearings on that nomination at the earliest possible moment – preferably before the November election.

We also call on Senate Republicans to put aside differences and unite behind President Trump’s nominee for the sake of our country and our posterity.

Elections have consequences, and the fact that President Trump has every legal right to appoint a Supreme Court nominee at any point during his term, whether it is an election year or not, is enshrined in law. Any delay is simply not acceptable.

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‘Burn it down,’ ‘pack the courts’ 

The pro-abortion left used similarly strong language in their statements on the death of Ginsburg Ginsburg, a pro-abortion feminist icon, but suggested that a possible “apocalypse” is here. “APOCALYPSE NOW,” the Huffington Post’s masthead blared on September 19, with an image of a coat hanger, a reference to the “backalley abortion” myth that before abortion on demand was imposed on America, unborn humans were killed via coat hangers.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the country’s largest abortion business Planned Parenthood, said, “this is not an understatement: The fate of our rights, our freedoms, our health care, our bodies, our lives, and our country depend on what happens over the coming months.”

Johnson also said, “To be very clear, it would be an absolute slap in the face to the millions of Americans who honor and cherish Justice Ginsburg’s legacy if President Trump and Mitch McConnell were to replace her with someone who would undo her life’s work and take away the rights and freedoms for which she fought so hard,” as if it would be unthinkable for Ginsburg’s seat to be occupied by anyone other than a pro-abortion feminist.

“We must fight like hell to prevent Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Senate Republicans from stealing yet another Supreme Court seat,” said Illyse Hogue, president of NARAL. “They have been chomping at the bit waiting for this moment, and their end goal ― to end the legal right to abortion in this country ― flies in the face of the values of a vast majority of Americans: that politicians have no place in personal decisions about pregnancy.”

As has been the case during ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and high-profile liberal events, leftists once again ignored their much-touted “social distancing” guidelines Friday night to gather on the steps of the Supreme Court, singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” and placing flowers on the steps.

If their public statements about the confirmation process are to be believed, though, they do not plan to remain peaceful for long.

The Daily Wire reported that on Friday, “After a number of speeches and an impromptu memorial, protesters called up the location of Mitch McConnell’s D.C. home and marched over.”

People also gathered at the Supreme Court on Saturday night, taking a more political tone.

Some on the left have began calling for a “revolution,” “court packing,” and to “burn it down” (language warning for one of the following tweets):