Say this much for the right wing: electoral reality doesn’t stop their fantasies. The latest round of speculation among conservatives is who they would push for the empty seat on the Supreme Court when President Cruz takes office.
Forget Merrick Garland, who is disqualified by virtue of being Obama’s nominee. Conservatives want Sen. Mike Lee to succeed the sainted (to them) Antonin Scalia.
If you are unfamiliar with Mike Lee, here’s all you need to know about him: he’s Ted Cruz’s only friend in the Senate. And any friend of Ted Cruz….
Lee, who rode the Tea Party wave to victory in 2010, is the right wing’s idea of a Constitutional scholar. That means he espouses ideas that run the gamut from offensive to crazy. Lee believes that the Constitution does not support “the power to redistribute our wealth,” otherwise known as Social Security. He has proposed repealing the 16th amendment, which established a progressive income tax, and he has supported the idea of nullification, which allows states to opt out of federal laws that they don’t like.
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What’s scary about Lee is that he has the veneer of qualifications. He actually is a Constitutional lawyer. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. His father was Solicitor General (the guy who argues the administration’s case before the Supreme Court) in the Reagan administration.
But Lee gets his ideas from one of the fringiest figures on the right: W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen was dubbed “an all-around nut job” by William F. Buckley’s National Review, but that hasn’t stopped him from surfacing, a decade after his death, as one of the leading intellectual lights of the modern GOP.
Needless to say, Skousen was a complete homophobe. When he was chief of police in Salt Lake City in the 1950s, Skousen encouraged the routine arrest and harassment of gay men as a moral crusade. He saw homosexuality as the gateway to Communism. After losing his job in Salt Lake City for being too crusading (he busted a card game that the mayor was attending), Skousen went on to work with or for a veritable who’s who of antigay activists: Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich, to name just a few.
Skousen churned out books, including the one that seems to have left a mark on Lee: The Five Thousand Year Leap. In that tome, Skousen argues that the Constitution is divinely inspired and lays out what he says are the key tenets of the document. After languishing in obscurity for decades, the book emerged as a best seller when Glenn Beck embraced it.
So if you think that a man who considered Dwight Eisenhower a Communist should inform the thinking of a Supreme Court Justice, then Mike Lee is the guy for you. What kind of company would Lee be keeping? The armed occupiers who seized federal land in Oregon earlier this year were carrying a copy of the Constitution annotated by Skousen.
It’s just another sign of how far to the ultra-right the GOP has drifted that the party could find someone who would actually make Scalia look like a relative moderate.
Photo Credit: Mike Lee’s Senate website.
Bob LaBlah
I wonder has the thought occurred to them he might be another Judge Roberts in disguise. If he does get there I sure as hell hope thats what he proves to be.
Bauhaus
Lee is an abomination.
Stache
He sounds like the perfect nomination for the Tea Tards. With him they can roll back all the Civil Rights laws and no more Abortion for anyone. All Religious freedom laws will be the law of the land.
RichieW
If he wins and God forbid he does let him know no Supreme Court nominee will allowed to voted on for his entire term. Filibuster every one of them.
Juanjo
He is a Dominionist as is Cruz. That means that in his view, the Constitution must be interpreted in accordance with the law of god and guess who decides what god’s law is on any particular subject? Yup – him. So no votes or other civil rights for women because women must be subservient to men – either their father, an older brother if the father is dead or if they are married off, then their husband. No rights for those who are not Christians or are the wrong kind of Christian because the country was set up for Christians only. Everyone else is here at sufferance. No birth control, no abortion, no gay people, no divorce – all are sins. Get the gist?
Kangol
@Bob LaBlah: Mike Lee is so far to the right he makes John Roberts look like Leon Trotsky.
I remember hearing him on NPR the night he first got elected to the US Senate, and he sounded like a parody of a far-right conservative Republican. He’s only proved this over and over since he’s been in the Senate.
This Dominionist fanatic Lee should not be anywhere near the levers of power in the US, ever.
Brian JC Kneeland
If they don’t have hearings on Obama’s selection – then they are ignoring what was done for Reagan$!A
Josh447
As long as it’s a Bible swilling hillbilly homophobe the gop couldn’t care less who gets nominated. They’d vote for Fred Phelps if they could, in a heartbeat.
Josh447
Hillary will make the right choice, guaranteed, if needed.
robho3
I really don’t think anyone needs to worry about this— the crazies- trump or Cruz will not be elected-
GC1985
@Bob LaBlah: Oh please. Justice Roberts isn’t a moderate and this guy is an extremist.
Trump would pick a right wing extremist too.
BOB K
@Bob LaBlah:
LEE IS AN IDIOT MORMON TEA PARTY HACK
DCguy
Nullification is just the more modern term for “States rights” and the same thing the southern secessionists were screaming about before the Civil War.
Lee is anti-American and supports the ideals of the Confederacy it would seem.
tjr101
This is why I don’t get some people, Bernie Sanders supporters in particular saying they will not vote come November if their preferred candidate doesn’t get the nominations. They don’t get the big picture and apparently are just in it depending on the direction the wind blows.
Transiteer
There’s not much difference between ISIS and the Republicans really. Very little.
He BGB
America is finally getting it right with the gay world after some backward steps. Let’s keep moving forward. It would be a shame to let republicans esp Tea Party a holes ruin it all with their ignorant and fearful ideas.