If you think there is a chance Senate Republicans will hold hearings on anyone President Obama nominates to fill the vacancy left by the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, you can forget it.
Or, if they should hold hearings, that Republican members of the Judiciary Committee will be honest and fair.
What happened last November in the gubernatorial race in Kentucky is all the explanation we need to understand why.
The Republican candidate, Matt Bevins, ran on a platform that pledged he would cut Medicaid and close down the state run health insurance exchange called Kynect.
That alone would make you think the people who live in the poorest counties in Kentucky and benefit the most from Medicaid and Kynect voted against Bevins.
They didn’t. In fact, 70% of them voted for him.
One woman who needed Medicaid because of regular blood tests and doctor visits for her hyperthyroidism and was at risk of losing coverage if Bevins won voted for him anyway.
“I’m just a die-hard Republican,” she said. She was not alone.
According to a study done by Andrea Malji, a student at Transylvania University, the larger the percentage of people on Medicaid in a given county, the larger the vote was for Bevins.
At the same time, Malji also found that Bevins didn’t win because a majority of voters in those poor counties were all “die hard Republicans.” The real reason was because they were voting against gay marriage, abortion, and Obamacare.
But here’s the illogic of their vote. The only issue Bevins could do anything about as governor was to undo Kynet, an arm of Obamacare, but that was the very thing these voters needed the most. That didn’t matter. They voted for him anyway.
Their vote made no sense, of course, which is precisely the point I am underscoring.
Reason and logic had no influence on the way the residents of Kentucky’s poorest counties voted.
What mattered were their long held religious and political beliefs that trumped reason and logic. In other words their vote was ideological.
This is what has happened to enough Republican voters that extremists now run the Party.
It also explains why Senate Republicans have no worry about losing their base support by taking the extreme position of refusing to honestly consider anyone President Obama might nominate for the Supreme Court Justice.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein tried to tell the nation that ideology was taking over the Republican Party when they wrote their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.
In the book Ornstein, a staunch conservative who founded the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, supports the conclusion that members of his own political party bear sole responsibility for the current stalemate in Washington.
Sadly not many Americans were ready to hear what they were saying, and certainly very few Republicans. In the face of voter apathy, in the four years since the book was published things have only gotten worse.
So this is the state of Republican politics, and is why President Obama will not appoint the next Supreme Court Justice.
Like it or not, and I don’t, that appointment will be made by the person who is elected next November.
If that is not a clarion call for all non-extremist Americans to go to the polls, I don’t know what is.
Once again truth hits us between the eyes. We hold the power to decide the kind of person we want to replace Justice Scalia.
It comes down to whether or not a majority of sensible voters will use that power to do what’s right for the sake of the nation.
We shall see.
linnposts.com 