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If Republicans Lose the Fight Over Scalia's Replacement, They Lose Me
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks during a ceremony naming a courtroom at The John Marshall Law School after former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg Friday, Sept. 28, 2012 in Chicago. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

If Republicans Lose the Fight Over Scalia's Replacement, They Lose Me

"We cannot afford to screw this up."

I'm not often "shocked" by the deaths of famous people, particularly if they're 79-years-old, but when I read that Justice Antonin Scalia died, I actually let out an audible gasp.  He was one of our nation's last true constitutionalists, a just man, a godly man, a great man, and his passing will leave a great hole in the conservative movement, the nation itself and especially the Supreme Court court. And that hole will be made even bigger if Obama is allowed to appoint the person who fills it.

Some notes on the jumbled mess left in the wake of this national tragedy:

Dark Explosions of Satanic Joy

Aside from being a good title for a death metal album, that about summarizes the way many liberals reacted to Scalia's passing. Yes, yes, it's the Internet and these are leftists, what else would you expect? Not much else, to be sure, but we shouldn't reach a point where the predictability of deplorable behavior suddenly becomes its own excuse.

FILE - In this April 7, 2008 file photo, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia speaks the Roger Williams University law school in Bristol, R.I.  To the casual observer, Justice Scalia seems an old-fashioned sort who is devoted to the Constitution's original meaning, prefers the Roman Catholic Mass in Latin and opposes TV cameras in the Supreme Court. But the 74-year-old Scalia wants it known that he owns an iPod and an iPad and does so much work on his computer that he "can hardly write in longhand anymore." (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File) Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia speaks the Roger Williams University law school in Bristol, Rhode Island, in 2008. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)

Within minutes of the man's death — and this, by the way, is a man with a wife, nine kids and dozens of grandkids — progressives erupted with applause and jubilation all over social media. Plenty of outlets have compiled some of the celebratory remarks, but that probably isn't necessary. If you didn't see it, you can imagine. And keep in mind, these weren't just a few scattered bad apples, but thousands and thousands of human beings gloating over the still warm corpse of a man so decent and admirable that some of his closest friends belonged to the ideological group now exalting in his demise. And these weren't merely anonymous trolls on Twitter, but famous folks and folks in media and seemingly regular folks who used their real names and real pictures to post triumphant and sarcastic obituaries. Then, not satisfied with ghoulishly dancing on a freshly dug grave, thousands more began offering their fervent prayers that Clarence Thomas die next.

It was an insane, subhuman display. Evil, and proudly so. Another moment — one of many, often provided by leftists — that made me utterly ashamed of what this country has become.

I took about 50 screenshots of Tweets and messages sent directly to me and thought about posting them, but I've decided against it. Many of the comments cannot be published — like the fantasies about defecating on Scalia's grave and defiling his corpse in various explicit ways — and the rest are from other callous hobgoblins too consumed by their own hatred and idiocy to feel shame anyway. Suffice it to say, American liberalism defied all odds Saturday night and somehow managed to reach an even lower low than the last low it reached. Liberalism is a religion of contempt and envy; each day it sinks deeper into moral oblivion, and upon Scalia's death it plunged to new and terrifying depths.

What made the elation of liberals so sickening and grotesque wasn't just the fact that they were delighting over a man's death, but why. This a crucial detail. Those looking to mitigate the guilt of liberals by drawing irrelevant comparisons have pointed out that conservatives have themselves allegedly reacted inappropriately in similar situations; many argued that, for instance, right-wingers celebrated Ted Kennedy's passing. But these two scenarios are quite distinct when you consider the motivations behind them.

Ted Kennedy — if this is the equivalence we're settling on — was a drunken bully. He was deeply corrupt, scandal-plagued, and so lacking in courage and character that he left a woman to drown to death after driving her over a bridge. He was also a staunch opponent of the Constitution, the rule of law, and anything resembling the principles that lay at the foundation of this country. He was so cowardly that, for political reasons, he became a radical advocate of abortion despite knowing it to be a terrible evil. He left death, corruption and deceit in his wake, and his legacy will be forever marked by crime, exploitation and his active endorsement of child murder and other atrocities.

Though these sad truths obviously do not mean we should take pleasure in his death, they do lend a certain context to any conservatives who let their anger get the better of them when he departed a few years ago. For Scalia, the context is very different. Scalia was, objectively speaking, an honorable, honest, courageous man. Moreover, he was right. I'm not going to say he was right about everything he ever said — nobody is, although Scalia likely came closer than most — but he took truthful, important, noble stands on a whole host of decisive issues. He stood for the rule of law, for the Constitution, for human life and for the family.

He was right. These were the right positions. Not right in my opinion or in his opinion, just right. Correct. True. So when liberals hate Scalia, their hatred is made all the more reprehensible and absurd because they hate him for being right and for being courageous and for being decent. It's like the difference between hating Osama bin Laden and hating Mother Teresa (many liberals do in fact have more hatred for Mother Teresa). We shouldn't hate anyone, but if you lapse into hating a man like bin Laden, it just shows you are a human being who struggles to mentally separate his numerous wretched deeds from his humanity. I think, in context, it's understandable if one were to lose that internal battle on occasion.

But if you hate Mother Teresa, it means, rather than hating evil and failing to properly distinguish the evil act from the evildoer, you actually hate goodness. And you hate goodness so much that you hate anyone who does what is good. In other words, the man who hates bin Laden at least hates him because he hates evil, but the man who hates Mother Teresa hates her because he loves evil. There is no moral equivalence here.

Liberals celebrating Scalia's death aren't just celebrating death, but evil. They aren't just wrong in what they do and say, but in the reason why they do and say it. They hate a man because he protected the law, justice, human life, marriage and truth. They hate him for his rightness, and they're happy he's dead so that wrongness may win. That's what makes this all so demented.

If Republicans Lose This Fight, They Lose Me

There are 11 months until we have a new president, praise the good Lord. That means Senate Republicans must spend 11 months rejecting Obama's Supreme Court nominations. They're saying now they'll hold the line, but forgive me if I feel some skepticism. I'd love to believe they'll hold the line, but I can't quite get past the unfortunate detail that they've never held the line on anything.

If that's going to suddenly change — and it must — they have to be prepared for a bloody, dangerous battle. Obama will likely put their heads in a vice, politically speaking, by picking a nominee who's "mainstream" and "moderate" and has some tenuous connection to the Republican Party. It will all be a ruse, of course. There is no possible way — literally zero chance — that Obama nominates a constitutionalist judge with a record of defending life and liberty. Whoever Obama picks will be pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-big government, anti-gun and pro-judicial activism. That means whoever he picks will be unacceptable. There is no point in saying, "Yes, but what if he makes a good pick?" He won't. Certainly we'll be told it's a good pick; we'll be told the pick is "appealing to both sides," "non-partisan," so on and so on, but that will be a lie. The only thing that should be appealing to our side is another Scalia, and he's not going to put another Scalia on the bench. It won't happen.

Yet we need another Scalia. Not want. Not hope for. Not in a perfect world. Need. If the Democrats succeed in establishing a full blown liberal court — leaving only Alito and Thomas as the reliable conservatives, with Roberts playing the part when he feels like it — the consequences will be unspeakable. Overturning Roe v. Wade will be out of the question for another generation, signing the death warrant of millions of yet-to-be-conceived children. States that have succeeded in passing laws and regulations curtailing the procedure will eventually be overruled by judicial fiat. Meanwhile, of course, states will never be freed from the requirement that they recognize the court's perverse and unconstitutional redefinition of marriage. Worse, when the government moves to coerce churches into performing gay "marriages," the Supreme Court will be there to officially codify the oppression into law, finally eradicating religious liberty in America once and for all.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks at the University of New Hampshire School of Law annual dinner celebrating its 40th anniversary at the Wentworth by the Sea hotel in New Castle, N.H., Friday, March 22, 2013. Credit: AP Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks at the University of New Hampshire School of Law annual dinner in New Castle, New Hampshire. (AP)

Go down the line through every amendment, look at every liberty detested by leftists (which is most of them) — free speech, gun rights, etc. — and wave goodbye should the court fall entirely into the hands of anti-Constitutional progressive activists. If the high court runs irreversibly left, you might as well take the Constitution out of the National Archives Building in D.C. and throw it into a raging dumpster fire. It's gone anyway. Finished. Maybe it's been finished for quite some time, but this will remove whatever vestiges of constitutionalism still remained covertly embedded into our system. It will be a day more disastrous than any you've ever seen; a joyful occasion for progressives, abortionists, homosexual activists, the national media, gun control lobbyists and bureaucrats, but a catastrophe for patriotic Americans.

So Republicans must fight this one with all they have. Whatever it costs. Whatever political capital they forfeit. Whatever they put on the line, including their careers. It doesn't matter. This right here is a hill to die on. No, it won't be easy. Democrats were already coming out of the woodwork moments after Scalia died to preemptively slander any Republican who might try to protect America from the uncontrollable tyranny of a hard-left Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton said Saturday night — with a straight face, somehow — Republicans would be "dishonoring the Constitution" if they try to prevent it from being continuously molested from now into eternity. There's going to be a lot of that. There's going to be a full year of that. But it doesn't matter. They can say what they want, cry all the tears they want, issue as many indignant statements as they want, but when it comes down to it, Republicans still have the power. And for once in their lives, they'd better use it.

Liberals would do the exact same thing if the shoe were on the other foot. Can you imagine them approving a pro-life constitutionalist less than a year before a presidential election, just because they care so much about "honoring the Constitution"? Please. Does anyone actually believe that? Do liberals actually expect us to believe they believe what they're saying right now? All of a sudden they think immediately approving Supreme Court nominations is some kind of solemn duty of the Senate? Where were these "dishonoring the Constitution" lectures back when Democrats were dragging Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas into the town square and assassinating their character in front of the jeering hordes? Democrats don't just block Republican nominations, they devour them. They rip them to shreds. They pulverize them into dust.

And these are the people who would confirm a Republican nomination during an election year? Stop it. God, himself, could yell down from the heavens commanding Democrats to approve a conservative Supreme Court pick under these circumstances and still they would refuse. In fact, they'd launch a campaign of character assassination against the Almighty and then refuse.

Everyone knows this to be true. Everyone. Everyone on the other side of this knows they would do exactly what the Republicans are saying they'll do. The only difference is Democrats would actually do it, whereas with Republicans I am not nearly as sure. That's why I'm making my position on this very clear: If Republicans fail in this fight — the most important political fight they have ever faced, with the fate of the law itself hanging in the balance — it will be an unthinkable treason. I will leave the party forever and never return. If they cannot stand firm now, they are as much enemies of America as their Democratic counterparts.

Not every fight is worth fighting, but some are worth fighting to the death. This is one of those fights. And failure will never be forgiven or forgotten.

This Should Change How You Look at the Election

It ought to go without saying, but many things that ought to go without saying still need to be said these days: The priority now among conservatives — and this should have been the priority all along — is to nominate a conservative. That is, a conservative who can be trusted to find, nominate and fight to approve a Scalia-caliber Supreme Court justice. If you do not understand how important this is, then you simply do not understand enough about your country to justify voting in the first place. You should stay home, read a few books and maybe consider joining us at the polls in 2020.

Whatever else you care about — immigration, foreign policy, taxes, whatever — it won't matter if we become a country where the rule of law is permanently supplanted by the whims of bureaucrats and judges, and human life and basic human liberties have been permanently and irreversibly suppressed, defiled, and redefined. Yes, that is already our condition in this country, but our job as voters is to elect someone who will fight to correct the situation. There are many theaters in the war to reclaim America, but one of the central political battlegrounds is the Supreme Court. And now we know the next president will have at least one seat to fill.

We cannot afford to screw this up. There is too much at stake.

To request Matt for a speaking engagement, send a message to Contact@TheMattWalshBlog.com. For all other comments and hate mail, send to MattWalsh@TheMattWalshBlog.com.

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