Dumb Ron Johnson: "If a conservative president's replacing a conservative justice..." to hell with "precedent."

Since there's no right wing principle that can't be reversed (because Republicans have different rules when they're in power), trolls who are easily convinced that something is true if it's repeated enough, are sticking to the fabrication that there is precedent for not nominating a supreme court justice in a presidents final year. I feel a little dumber just typing that. This suddenly got tweets:

Still clinging to their guns, god and lies, who cares about the truth. First, PolitiFact already decided this one:

False, but who cares. Liberal media right?

But as it turns out, "precedent" isn't the real reason, as if most of us didn't already know that. Here's Dumb Ron Johnson with the bubble bursting truth:

TPM: Johnson was asked on Wisconsin radio show "Morning Mess" about Senate Republicans' refusal to consider President Obama's forthcoming nomination to the Supreme Court. The host hypothesized that things would be different if Mitt Romney were in the White House.

"It’s a different situation. Generally, and this is the way it works out politically, if you’re replacing — if a conservative president’s replacing a conservative justice, there’s a little more accommodation to it."

Oops, and for added measure, why not freely admit the court is a partisan right wing arm of the Republican Party too:

"But when you're talking about a conservative justice now being replaced by a liberal president who would literally flip the court — you know, let's face it, I don't think anybody's under any illusion — President Obama's nominee would flip the court from a 5-4 conservative to a 5-4 liberal controlled court. And that's the concern is that our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, our First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty, will be threatened."

The great American truth teller Sen. Elizabeth Warren was just as stunned as I was:

Warren: "I mean, what's it gonna take for these guys. Ron Johnson today said 'well, if it were a Republican president, yea, we'd feel differently about doing that vote.' I mean, can you be any more naked about what's going on? That there is no point of principle here for those guys. This is naked politics."

Remember when justices were supposed to impartial? Not a lot of people do today. The same reasoning went into eliminating the Government Accountability Board overseeing elections in Wisconsin; it was replaced by partisan political hacks because basically no one is really ever impartial anymore, so screw it.

 Which brings me to Judge Richard Posner's comments that sum up what's really going on:

WaPo: Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit:

The decision of the Republican Senate majority to consider no nominee of President Obama to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court ... is significant, but not for the usual reasons given ... the Senate’s action lies in reminding us that the Supreme Court is not an ordinary court but a political court, or more precisely a politicized court, which is to say a court strongly influenced in making its decisions by the political beliefs of the judges. 

Most of what the Supreme Court does — or says it does — is “interpret” the Constitution and federal statutes, but I put the word in scare quotes because interpretation implies understanding a writer’s or speaker’s meaning, and most of the issues that the court takes up cannot be resolved by interpretation because the drafters and ratifiers of the constitutional or statutory provision in question had not foreseen the issue that has arisen. This is notoriously the case with respect to the Constitution ... Eighteenth- and 19th-century politicians, and many 20th-century ones as well, did not foresee or make provision for regulating electronic surveillance, sound trucks, flash-bang grenades, gerrymandering, child pornography, flag-burning or corporate donations to political candidates.

When judges are not interpreting, they’re creating, and to understand judicial creation one must understand first of all the concept of “priors.” Priors are attitudes, presuppositions derived from upbringing, from training, from personal and career experience, from religion and national origin and character and ideology and politics ... they are impervious to evidence ... their priors will tug them this way or that, and the tug may be decisive ... bowing to the inevitable is not misconduct, however much it deviates from the “official” — the self-protective “the law made me do it” — conception of judicial decision-making.

The Republican senators’ behavior is proof (were any needed) of the Supreme Court’s politicization.

My conservative friend in Milwaukee had this response to Posner's opinion...I wish I was kidding, or at least he was:

For the record, never forget how every Republican presidential candidate went along with an attempt to sabotage the country for their own selfish political gain, offering up second grade excuses for the delay: