First thoughts on Scalia's passing

Clearly, we lost a patriot, a brilliant legal mind, a man of deep Christian faith, and a human being with a big heart and a zest for life.

Along with losing an indispensable voice for Constitutional fealty on the Court, we lose yet another personification of the integrity, humanity and intellectual rigor that is increasingly at a premium in this rotten culture.

This event creates a vacuum of the most profound sort.

The question obviously looms: What next?

Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO's The Corner provides a bracingly candid assessment of what each side - the Freedom-Haters, led by the Most Equal Comrade, and those in Congress who revere the Constitution - has in the way of advantages and disadvantages:

As far as I can see, President Obama has at least two good options before him. The first would be to try to drive out turnout in 2016 by nominating someone who a) will agree with his party on pretty much everything, and b) can be spun easily into a martyr. As we learned with the Sotomayor nomination in 2009 (and as I learn each time I criticize her), it is extremely easy to pretend that Republican opposition to unacceptable judicial philosophies is “really” opposition to the immutable characteristics of whoever happens to hold them. If Obama is worried that his party might lose the election in November, he’d be smart to choose a radical candidate who reflects one or more of the Democrats’ key minority constituencies, and then to demagogue the hell out of the resultant contretemps for as long as he feasibly can. In truth, conservative opposition to this candidate would have no more to do with his identity than progressive opposition to Clarence Thomas has to do with his being black. But this is politics, not physics, and nonsense flies cleanly through the air these days. If Obama is so minded, he can give that nonsense a push. Obama’s second good option would be to heighten the civil war within the GOP by offering up a nominee that could feasibly be approved. If the president were to propose, say, the D.C. Circuit’s Sri Srinivasan, he would be able to point out repeatedly that Srinivasan had served in the Bush administration’s Office of the Solicitor General, and to note that, last time the Senate had been asked to vote on his nomination, it did so 97-0. (Among those who voted for Srinivasan in 2013 were Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, all of whom have suggested that the Senate should wait to replace Scalia until the next president is in office.) As far as I can see, a Srinivasan-type appointment would provoke a serious fight within the Right, potentially weakening it ahead of November. In one quarter, you would hear the go-along-get-along types arguing that the president has a right to choose whomever he wants as long as they are “qualified,” and warning that a Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton nomination might yield someone much worse. In another quarter, you would hear the firebrands terming anybody who was so much as considering acquiescence to be a traitor to the cause. If Obama wants to see a public spat between the Republican nominee and some of the party’s elders in the Senate, this course strikes me as a clever way of doing it. All in all, the President has the upper hand here. The Constitution serves in large part as a counter-majoritarian and government-limiting document, and, as such, the party that wants to expand government and channel the transient will of the majority will always have an advantage in such cases as legal meanings are put to a popular vote. In general, the GOP’s best play is to find judges who will uphold the charter as it is written, and to secure them in place as long-term bulwarks against the majority. (This is one reason that “judicial retention elections” would be disaster for conservatism.) But this, alas, is not an option here. Rather, conservatives are now fighting a desperate defensive action over which they have only nominal control (the “advise” of the equation part will be steadfastly ignored; in practice, the GOP has only “consent” at their disposal — or, rather, “don’t consent”).

The Most Equal Comrade has no interest in defending American interests on the world stage, but he does know how to fight for his warped vision here at home. We underestimate his prowess and determination regarding the Great Leveling Project at our peril.