The War Over Scalia's Replacement

Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times looks at the Republican threat to not only block any nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, but to deny President Obama his Constitutional role in even nominating a replacement for Antonin Scalia:

"Once upon a time, the death of a Supreme Court justice wouldn’t have brought America to the edge of constitutional crisis. But that was a different country, with a very different Republican Party. In today’s America, with today’s G.O.P., the passing of Antonin Scalia has opened the doors to chaos."

The "very different Republican Party" that Krugman notes was on vivid and vulgar display in last Saturday night's debate in South Carolina: the lies, the attacks, the extremist rhetoric, the belligerent poses.  It's also a Party,  as Krugman observes, that has denied the legitimacy of the past two Democratic Presidents (ironically while the last Republican President was handed the 2000 election by a Republican-majority Supreme Court).  Indeed, it attempted a Constitutional coup by impeaching President Clinton, and has aggressively and dishonestly obstructed and undermined nearly every piece of legislation -- some of it theirs in years past -- proposed by President Obama (while the Beltway media placed the problem on Obama for not having cocktail hour with the Rethuglican vandals).

Krugman also rejects the punditocracy's simplistic dodge about "partisanship" causing the problem that ignores the decades-long march by Rethuglicans to the extreme right:

"But simply pointing to rising partisanship as the source of our crisis, while not exactly wrong, can be deeply misleading. First, decrying partisanship can make it seem as if we’re just talking about bad manners, when we’re really looking at huge differences on substance. Second, it’s really important not to engage in false symmetry: only one of our two major political parties has gone off the deep end." (emphasis added)

All the more reason to elect a Democratic Senate and President next fall.

BONUS:  As you would imagine, there are lots of good reads about the Republican obstructionism, here, here, and here, for starters.  Andy Borowitz, too.