With all of the hoopla surrounding the 2016 election I could not help but to reflect on the decision that Chief Justice John Roberts made in 2013 when he elected to side with four other justices to gut the Voting Rights Act.  According to an article in the New York Times Magazine by Jim Ruttenberg dated July 29, 2015 entitled ‘A Dream Undone’, Chief justice John Roberts “declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to move on.”  Move on to what; all of the bills and laws seeking to obstruct or block legitimate voters’ from voting who have the right to vote?  Laws, some of which were put into place on the same day that the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and many of which are now being struck down by courts throughout the country.

Many Republicans expressed strong support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when he refused to hold hearings to confirm or reject President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.  This nominee is well respected by Democrats and Republicans and has an outstanding resume, which delineates his qualifications to become a Supreme Court Justice.  Nonetheless, most Republican senators have refused to even meet with him because they are holding out hope that a Republican will win the 2016 general election and they can get a bona fide conservative nominee that will be nominated by a Republican president.  The confirmation hearing for Judge Garland has yet to take place.

Republicans now have their nominee and he has promised that he will nominate a conservative to replace Justice Scalia and said that any future nominees during his tenure will also be conservatives.  But there is a problem.  Their nominee is Donald J. Trump and establishment Republicans loathe him.  They and most political pundits laughed when he announced that he would run for president and said that he would drop out early in the race especially with the quality of candidates that he would be pitted against.

When Mr. Trump dispatched a number of those candidates early on and continued to whittle them down during the primaries, establishment Republicans threw up roadblocks that they thought he would be unable to negotiate.  It failed.  As he continued to knock off their stable of top-flight, highly touted candidates, they tried to find a way to prevent him from getting enough delegates to win the nomination outright.  That failed too.  Now that Donald Trump is the official nominee, with each passing day, he is driving them ever closer to the edge of insanity; and now they are rhetorically asking the question, what if he withdraws from the race?  Ha!  I’m sure that that is going to happen.  After all, that would make him his own poster child of losers.

I can see why Republicans would want to assure that they retain a conservative-leaning Supreme Court if that court will continue to make decisions like Citizens United and Shelby County v Holder.  Republicans say that they are an inclusive party that wants to build a bigger and more inclusive tent that exemplifies the so called fact that they want to represent all of the people.  We have already witnessed how determined and sincere they are about building that tent; they gave up on it before they ever really got started.  The matter is now exacerbated by the fact that their 2016 standard bearer has pulled back the curtain and revealed the kind of party that they really are.

This does not by any means mean that all Republicans share the same kind of racist and divisive views that their nominee spouts on a regular basis.  But by remaining quiet when he does these things and refusing to withdraw their endorsements of him raises eyebrows and one certainly cannot be faulted for believing that they are, at the very least, tacitly in agreement with him and therefore complicit in what he is doing.

It does not matter if they are doing this only for the sake of party unity and to assure that a Republican occupies the White House as president come January 2017.  And it does not matter if they are doing it because they believe that the only way that they can assure that Republicans can maintain a conservative Supreme Court is through party unity at all costs.

There is no valid argument that can justify winking at the things that Donald Trump has said and done.  Frankly speaking, one could argue that such behavior is just as bad as actually harboring the same feelings as Mr. Trump and it is just as destructive to America because it depicts a false picture of who we really are as Americans.  And tacitly agreeing with his racist and divisive views for what one might even consider the noblest of reasons is dangerous and will have the same cancerous effect, it will rot America from within until it is arrested and, hopefully, ultimately eradicated.

Eulus Dennis – author, Operation Rubik’s Cube and Living Between The Line