However the SCOTUS vacancy gets handled, a national crackup is a certainty - as is the sovereignty of God

Eternal verities are more significant than momentary snapshots of the lay of the land; our persnickety little hills to die on are not

Once again, the phrase “just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any wilder” is grimly apt. Less than 24 hours after Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s passing, the hot takes and insistences upon a course of action were coming forth like a barrage of machine gun fire.

There’s at least one sense in which the Left has an advantage over the Right here: it’s united in its sense of what the way forward should be.

The Right is beset by a fissure that renders it vulnerable to ineffectuality. Those on one side of it have lost all sight of a core tenet of conservatism - namely, the cultivation of goodwill wherever possible.

The question is whether the sense, on the part of those more inclined toward Trumpism than recognizable conservatism, that the present moment is so fraught with urgency that civility and the extension of grace must be jettisoned. The most glaring example so far is Republican House member Doug Collins’s choice to make his first reaction a tweet about Ginsberg’s position on abortion - and make it in the most boneheaded way he could.

Collins apparently has not given much consideration to the deep friendship of Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia, the latter of which was vehemently opposed to Ginsberg’s stance on the rights of fetal Americans. There was an extension of grace and a type of respect between them that transcended this profound difference. It would have been much easier for them to harbor rancor for one another, but they chose to be bigger that that choice. Plus, they both liked opera and chess.

Senators Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, while not exactly Trumpists, have decided that political expediency requires them to keep silent about the way their principles conflict with the Trumpist agenda. That has motivated them to issue statements along the lines of “yeah-yeah-condolences-to-the-family-now-let’s-get-down-to-the-work-of-selecting-nominating-and-dragging-across-the-finish-line-a-suitable-Supreme-Court-justice.”

McConnell, in particular, has put himself in a bind, given that it was in March of 2016 that he said the Senate wouldn’t vote on a nominee put forth by Obama so close to an election, that the American people ought to have a say in the selection in such circumstances. Mid-September in an election year is considerably closer to the election than March, and McConnell’s determined to mover forward.

A couple of things about that, though: several SCOTUS nominees have been confirmed really close to an election since 1900, and there is no law covering this, only a norm, and the applicable norm here is determined by whether the Senate majority is of the same party as the president.

That being so, there is another consideration here: the nation has arguably only ever been as polarized as it is now a handful of times, at most. That means that any way this would be handled would be tantamount to taking a match to a tinderbox.

I can only give the possible scenarios we face so much emotional investment. In a perfect world - perfect according to my standards, anyway - every Supreme Court justice would be an originalist of impeccable depth and integrity like Scalia and Clarence Thomas, just as such a perfect world would operate according to the principles of free-market economics, we’d have a rich, ennobling culture, and everyone would confess Jesus as Lord. Oh, and I’d have the athleticism and robust health of an eighteen-year-old even as I ate biscuits and gravy for breakfast every day.

I see no reason to have a hard and fast take about the present moment because the lay of the land is such that whatever is going to actually occur is going to fall far short of what I want to see. Even if a SCOTUS nominee about whom I’m enthusiastic gets confirmed by November 1, we’re still going to be perilously close to the crackup of our nation.

My principles are what they are. I’m certain that a human soul, with all the rights attendant to a human being at any age, is introduced into the space-time plane at the moment of conception. I have a strong sense of what is a right and what, by definition, cannot be a right. (Think health care or a job, or anything requiring the effort of one’s fellow human being.) I’m absolutist about property rights and free-market economics.

But no amount of foot-stamping on my part, or getting behind some brand or political figure, is going to bring about the reification of the world I’d like to live in. This vale of tears is always going to fall short of the glory of the eternal realm.

So I’m only able to get so worked up about how the Supreme Court vacancy, or, for that matter, the presidential election turns out. As I said in the post immediately prior to this one, the rot will continue whether we have four more years of bombast and strongman antics or return to the “fundamental transformation” that was being pursued prior to that. That’s just the nature of the 2020 post-America beast.

Best not to expend energy trying to stave off that which is inevitable.