The Ginsburg Gambit
By Colonel Mike Angley
“It is not like I have gone crazy; I just don’t want to take any chances. You never know what could happen.” ~Ruth Bader Ginsburg
How did we get to where we are today? We have an 86-year-old Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG to her fanboys and groupie girls), who is suffering from recurring bouts of cancer, cracked ribs from falls, vertigo, and is AWOL more often than ‘present and accounted for.’ When she does report for duty, she appears nearly catatonic, disengaged, and barely lucid.
No private sector company would allow an employee her age and condition to continue drawing a paycheck for which she contributes less and less each year. She’d have been involuntarily retired long ago.
I write this piece out of a sense of compassion. It is time for her to move on and focus on her health, but she and the Democrat Party have created a quandary for themselves and the nation. This quandary – the Ginsburg Gambit — has them boxed in to few choices except to keep her on life support for as long as possible.
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly state that SCOTUS justices serve for life (I’m sure a few Creepy Porn Lawyers would disagree). Article III, Section 1 simply states that judges (including SCOTUS), “…shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” That has been accepted to mean a lifetime tenure. Judges may be removed via the impeachment process, but that carries a high standard (treason, high crimes, or misdemeanors).
Whether or not the Constitution really intended justices to serve for life, I do believe the spirit behind their tenure implies they must be able to perform their duties fully, well, and consistently…the ‘good’ part of good behavior. But what about no behavior? Ms. Ginsburg simply is not really on the bench often enough or functioning fully to behave at all, good, bad, or otherwise.
She is no longer serving in any real capacity except to vote in concurrence or dissent, depending on which direction her leftist minders guide her. So long as her body is warm, the Democrat Party whips her to stay on the bench to cast votes. Then, it’s back to ‘Weekend at Ruthie’s’ mode until she needs propping up again.
Harsh? Yes, and my criticism and frustration with all this is directed at two targets. One is the Democrat Party for its ghoulish, selfish, and uncaring demand that Ginsburg remain an Associate Justice until her very last breath. So long as they can charge up the paddles on the political defibrillator and scream, “Clear!” each time she’s needed for a vote, then that’s all they care about. Her actual health, welfare, and comfort be damned. Yes, they are cold, nasty, callous people.
(By the way, the only time Democrats have ever been vehemently pro-life is when it comes to Ginsburg. As for her decision to retire or stay, they are suddenly anti-choice. But I digress.)
My other target for criticism is Ginsburg herself. She conspired with the Democrat Party to stay on the court way past her prime, attempting to time her departure for when the political planets lined up best. But like the fool who tries to play the market to make a fortune, the Ginsburg Gambit didn’t work.
Now the left is stuck, desperate for one or more of three things to happen, each of which appears increasingly dim:
- Donald Trump loses re-election in 2020 (stopping him is priority #1, and the nuttiness of the left and its Ministry of Propaganda, the mainstream media, will only intensify).
- The Senate flips to Democrat control (okay, this has some possibility because of the knuckleheaded establishment GOP moderates who keep ignoring the base).
- Justice Ginsburg stays alive for the next six years (and a Democrat wins in 2024).
The best opportunity the Notorious RBG had to retire and ensure her liberal replacement was during the first six years of Obama’s administration. The Marxist President was certain to have selected an Alinsky-like justice, and the Democrat-controlled Senate, under the ruthless thumb of Dingy Harry Reid, would have sailed the nominee through faster than Soy Boy Beto O’Rourke can squeal, “¡Me encanta Taco Bell!”
Enough feckless, moronic, bobblehead Republicans would have voted for Alinsky himself had he been Obama’s chosen one, just to ‘reach across the aisle.’ Worse still, were the nominee someone who insisted on being gendered as a they/them/ve/ver/xe/xem or whatever, then the vote may have been damn near 100 to 0.
But RBG wasn’t ready to retire, and Obama’s hubris made him incapable of foreseeing looming political misfortune. Nope. Instead, he and Ginsburg held ground because of two ‘certainties’ in the Ginsburg Gambit. First, was that Mitch McConnell would never ‘turtle’ his way to the Senate Majority Leader position. But he did, thus scuttling any real chance of moving her replacement forward. The second was that Hillary Clinton would be the next president, the religion of her ‘inevitability.’
(By the way, if your grandmother were 86 and needed expensive health care like Ginsburg, Obama wouldn’t want the state to pay for it. He’d tell her she should take a pain pill instead. I digress, again.)
But a funny thing happened en route to the Clinton Coronation. She lost. Bigly.
- She lost despite cheating in the debates.
- She lost despite every poll rigged in her favor.
- She lost despite the FBI ignoring her crimes.
- She lost despite an FBI/Intelligence Community operation to take down Trump.
- She lost despite voter fraud by illegals and dead people.
- And she lost despite overwhelming, constant, gushing, fawning, sycophantic, orgasmic media coverage.
In the history of losing, Hillary was the losingest loser of important things to lose.
And that monkey wrench was so unforeseen, that it crippled the left which then resorted to histrionics so nasty and dark that they nearly torpedoed President Trump’s two SCOTUS nominees, Associate Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
The left and nearly every Democrat concocted all manner of falsehoods, vicious personal attacks, and an endless parade of liars to claim rapes and make other vulgar allegations against men who have done nothing wrong. They are both superb public servants, excellent husbands and fathers, and faithful stewards of the Constitution. You know, everything the left hates.
When Ginsburg retires or passes on, what will follow will go beyond the pale. The Democrat Party’s Clownfest in the Senate was awful enough for Trump’s first two SCOTUS nominees, but we all need to brace ourselves for conduct so egregious it will stun our senses. Don’t forget, the Democrat Party’s nascent militant terror wing, successor to the party’s beloved KKK, is Antifa. Black is the new white, after all.
Let’s face it, if Trump gets to replace RBG during his first or second term, it will be the fault of two forces and two only: the Democrat Party (chiefly Obama) for compelling RBG to remain on duty and RBG herself for her stubbornness.
All this will have been borne from the Ginsburg Gambit. The left took its chances, and it lost. The consequences of that are to the benefit of this great nation as Donald Trump gets to seat one more justice who will work to protect and preserve the Republic and our sacred Constitution.
Colonel Michael (“Mike”) Angley is retired from the United States Air Force, a published thriller author, and a conservative writer who fashions himself as Attila the Hun with a laptop. Mike wrote for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government and Big Peace blogs before the Breitbart consolidation, receiving superb feedback and kudos for typically weaving in pop culture references with his far right perspectives. He enjoys writing about military affairs, national security issues, and politics and is an avid Second Amendment advocate. When he’s not writing, he’s busy annoying liberals with FaceBook posts and Twitter tweets that point out the obvious flaws and fallacies of the left.
During his 26-year USAF career, the Colonel was a Special Agent with the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The OSI is a sister agency to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and has an identical mission that includes felony-level criminal, fraud, and narcotics investigations as well as counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations. His USAF experiences spanned multiple regions around the globe with five command assignments and duties at foreign, regional, theater and national levels.
He is a seasoned counterintelligence and counterespionage officer from the Cold War era, and if you ask him he’ll tell you the spy-vs-spy days were indeed the heady, glory era of espionage. During the latter half of his career he focused on counterterrorism missions in the Middle East and the Far East and operationalized many of today’s concepts for this unique arena while working the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and a few other “choice” locations. When Colonel Angley retired in 2007, he was a Senior Supervisory Special Agent and was in command of all worldwide OSI matters at Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs, CO.
Mike Angley is also a published, award-winning author of three thriller novels in the “Child Finder” trilogy. His debut novel, “Child Finder,” received a glowing review from the Library Journal which placed it on its Summer Reading list in 2009. “Child Finder” and its companion sequel novels all won various awards from the Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) and the Public Safety Writers Association. In 2012, Mike was named MWSA’s “Author of the Year,” largely for work on his third novel, “Child Finder: Revelation.”
As an avid user of social media, Mike can be found and friended on Facebook (mike.angley) and followed on Twitter (@MikeAngley). His website is www.mikeangley.com. Following his USAF retirement, Mike and his family stayed in Colorado Springs, CO where they enjoy daily, majestic views of Pikes Peak and the Rocky Mountains.
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