Judgment Day

At the end of last week, an event took place in the United States that could determine the country's future for the next four years.

That is, to have an impact on the upcoming presidential elections no less than the COVID-19 pandemic and the riots of the BLM movement.

At her home in Washington, DC, 87-year-old Ruth Ginsburg, the oldest US Supreme Court Justice, has died surrounded by a loving family.

Ginzburg fought bravely against various cancers for more than 20 years, but ultimately lost the battle.

Her personal tragedy was, however, not in this (after all, all people are mortal), but in the fact that the informal head of the liberal wing of the country's Supreme Court was determined to live until the end of Trump's presidency, or at least until the election results were announced, to which are already less than a month and a half.

The Supreme Court of the United States (abbreviated as SCOTUS) is an institution extremely important for the political system of America.

And it is extremely conservative: for 229 years of its existence, it has hardly undergone major changes.

Only the number of judges themselves changed: at the very beginning there were six of them, but as the territory of the country increased, the number of SCOTUS members also grew.

The country's constitution does not specifically stipulate this, but in 1869 the US Congress decreed that there should be nine judges of the Supreme Court (an odd number was a fundamental condition for developing independent decisions), and since then this rule has not been revised.

The prestige of SCOTUS judges in America is extremely high.

Their names and even details of their biography are known not only to professional lawyers, but also to the general public.

They - at least in theory - are not involved in Washington intrigues, do not stain their white robes with "dirty politics," and are not affected by conflicts of interest.

Supreme Court justices make their decisions based solely on the letter and spirit of the law, and in this sense their power is higher than any other - both executive and legislative - in any case, this was the original idea of ​​the Founding Fathers, who were looking for an alternative to the British tradition in which justice was one of the most important aspects of royal power.

Life, of course, makes its own adjustments to this ideal scheme.

Although SCOTUS members should be impartial, they, like all normal living people, have their own political preferences, expressed in how they interpret certain laws: based on a conservative, moderate or liberal philosophy of law.

Therefore, in reality, there are conservatives, and centrists, and liberals in the Supreme Court - and Ruth Ginsburg was just one of the latter.

From a young age she fought for the equality of women (it began after she was given a chair at law school back in 1963, but with a salary less than that of her male colleagues), and as a result she became a kind of icon of the feminist movement.

She advocated for women's right to abortion and, of course, LGBT rights.

Plus, Ginsburg hated President Trump.

In the summer of 2016, she said in an interview with The New York Times: "I can't imagine what our country would be like with Donald Trump as our president."

And she added that her husband (who died in 2010) would have said if he learned about Trump's victory: "Now it's time for us to move to New Zealand."

In general, her statements about Trump (then a presidential candidate) were so rude that even the most liberal The New York Times in an editorial called on Ginsburg to stop "political criticism and labeling."

A few days before her death, dictating her will, she confessed to her granddaughter that her most ardent desire was that another judge would not be nominated in her place until a “new president” was elected in America.

In recent decades, the alignment in the Supreme Court has been more in favor of the liberals.

In addition to Ruth herself, the liberal camp included judges Elena Cagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breuer, who were often joined by centrist Anthony Kennedy.

Donald Trump, who came to the White House with a conservative program, has repeatedly stated that he intends to appoint SCOTUS lawyers who can overturn the Supreme Court decision in the Roe v. Wade case, adopted in 1973 and legalizing abortion in the United States.

The first step in this direction was taken in April 2017, when the US Senate, after a long struggle with the Democrats, approved the candidacy of Neil Gorsach, who replaced the no less conservative Antonin Scalia (remember this name) who died in office.

In 2018, for several months, all of America with bated breath followed the legal drama that unfolded first on television and then in the halls of Congress - the struggle to appoint another conservative to the Supreme Court, Brett Cavanaugh, who was supposed to replace the retired Anthony. Kennedy.

Cavanaugh became a target for liberals and anti-trumpists, who accused him of attempting to rape a certain Christine Blazy Ford, allegedly taking place 36 years ago.

The two-month persecution of Cavanaugh, to which the "mitushki" and angry Washington feminists joined, ended in a shameful failure: in the end, the Senate approved Cavanaugh as a life member of the Supreme Court (50 senators voted for, 48 against, one of the members of the upper house of Congress abstained, more one did not come to the meeting).

The balance in the Supreme Court seems to have shifted towards the conservatives, but that was not the case!

The Liberals continued to have the advantage as SCOTUS Chairman John Roberts occasionally supported their side.

That is why the balance of power in the Supreme Court in the era of unprecedented turbulence associated with the November 3 presidential elections depends on who will replace the ultraliberal Ginsburg.

After all, it is the Supreme Court that has the last word in the case when the imperfection of the American electoral system does not give an advantage to any of the candidates.

So, in 2000, it was SCOTUS, by five votes to four, decided to interrupt the counting of ballots, which were conducted manually in Florida (the gap between Bush Jr. and Gore was just over a thousand votes), after which the notorious John Bolton played the American "sailor Zheleznyak": he entered to the Tallahassee City Library at ten o'clock in the evening with the Supreme Court order in hand and said, "I am the Bush-Cheney team, and I am here to stop the recount!"

And given that, despite all the ritual howls of CNN and other liberal media about the allegedly indisputable advantage of the old senile Biden, the Democrats are already preparing for a loss on election day and a possible revenge later (after the votes received by mail have been counted), the role The Supreme Court takes on critical importance.

That is why the decrepit icon of liberals, feminists and LGBT people, Ruth Ginsburg, was so eager to hold out until the elections - and that is why her death dealt a terrible blow to the rosy hopes of the Democrats.

Moreover, Donald Trump has already announced that he intends to name a judge who (or who) will replace the late Ginzburg without delay.

And the leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately confirmed that the upper house of Congress would consider this candidacy as soon as possible - and the fact that this will happen in the last months of the presidential election year is not a hindrance to the appointment.

The list of possible candidates, published two weeks before Ginsburg's death, contains more than 20 names, including former Trump rival in the GOP primaries Ted Cruz and highly conservative Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas.

But the greatest chances, according to experts, are with 48-year-old Illinois Court of Appeals judge Amy Connie Barrett, who was nominated for this post by Trump himself in May 2017.

When Anthony Kennedy resigned, Barrett was named as his possible successor, but then Trump opted for Cavanaugh, believing that the young Illinois lawyer had too little experience.

However, according to rumors leaked from the White House, the president told his associates: "Let's save her (Barrett - 

) for Ginsburg."

And now the time has come.

Now the key role is played not so much by experience as by the firm conservative position that Barrett takes - she is a student of the very Antonin Scalia, who was one of the most consistent conservatives in SCOTUS.

A member of the Catholic People of Praise, Barrett is a consistent opponent of abortion.

Back in 2015, she signed an open letter affirming the "value of human life from conception to natural death."

And since “from conception”, then abortion is murder.

But even more frightening for American liberals, the same letter asserted that marriage "is based on the unbreakable obligations of man and woman."

LGBT organizations immediately sounded the alarm: hey, that Barrett is against same-sex marriage!

You may not believe it, but the prospect of another conservative appearing in the US Supreme Court is viewed by many "progressives" of the Obama Spill primarily as a threat of legalized sodomy, and only secondarily as a political factor capable of securing four more years of Trump's presidency.

However, the liberals do not intend to give up without a fight.

The most frostbitten already propose to "burn down Congress" in order to prevent Trump from appointing his judge in SCOTUS ("frostbitten" is by no means synonymous with marginalized people: a similar appeal was made, for example, by university professor Emmett McFarlane, whose Twitter, however, works in the "only for their own ").

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatens that Democrats "have arrows in their quiver" to stop the nomination of a judge proposed by the lame duck, that is, Trump.

True, Pelosi refused to specify what kind of arrows they were, but the journalist George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed her, suggested that the Democrats might try to start a new procedure for impeachment of the president - the previous one, as you know, ignominiously failed in February this year.

It is highly likely that Trump will announce the name of a successor (or rather a successor) to Ginzburg this week.

After that, such a "game of thrones" will begin in Washington, in comparison with which the eight-season saga based on the novels of George Martin will seem like an unpretentious school amateur performance.

After all, there is more at stake than just a victory in the presidential election.

It depends on who will take the place vacated after the death of the oldest judge SCOTUS, what course America will take in the third decade of the 21st century - liberal-progressive or conservative-traditional.

Relatively speaking, by way of Obama or by way of Trump.

Judgment Day is approaching for America.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.