I was thinking of using the headline "Turnabout Intruder," since we are talking about a Senator named Kirk who appears to be descending into lunacy. But I figured it would be too "inside baseball" even for all but the most hardcore Trekkers. And besides, given that the Illinois senator is one of the few actual RINOs in the Senate GOP caucus, and he's up for re-election this fall in an indelibly "blue" State in a presidential election year, which typically means higher Democrat turnout, "Captain" Kirk "gettin' mavericky wit' it" isn't much of a surprise:
Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk referenced a stroke that almost killed him at the age of fifty-two while revealing Monday that he supports Barack Obama's right to nominate a successor to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In an opinion piece published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Kirk, who is up for re-election this year and considered vulnerable, writes that his near-death experience "forged for me a renewed sense of clarity and purpose — that I will fight to do right for Illinois all the time."
And for him, that means breaking with his party and supporting a hearing and vote on Obama's Supreme Court pick.
Obama doesn't have a "right" to replace Justice Scalia; he has the constitutional authority to make a nomination for that purpose. And the Senate has the right to stuff that nomination and otherwise handle it as it sees fit. Kirk is going out of his way to gushingly tout the former while actively flouting and attempting to forfeit the latter, not because it constitutes "doing right for Illinois" - because replacing the constitutionalist Scalia with an Obamunist partisan hack like Loretta Lynch or a crook like Hillary Clinton or a minority version of the turncoat David Souter like Sri Srinivasan emphatically does not - but because his electoral ass is hanging out to wind and, like any RINO, he's trying everything short of defecting to the other side to try and save his seat, up to and including trying to shut down any criticism from the Right by hiding behind his illness. Again, not surprising, but still disappointingly dishonorable.
I don't know how much of a chink in the GOP armor this is, unless it tips other RINOs like Susan Collins, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham into following his unworthy lead. The original Maverick is also up for reelection this fall, and evidently wants to stick around. We'll see.
Meanwhile, this old video of Slow Joe from 1992 may or may not be a counter-thing:
Sen. Joe Biden in 1992 says President Bush should "not name a nominee until after the November election..." #SCOTUS
For the record, this makes it the current president, current vice president, current Senate minority leader, and incoming Senate minority leader who have all gone on record in the past in favor of obstructing a Supreme Court nominee - when the president who would make that nomination is a Republican. If I were the RNC, I'd be making ads of this and blitzing it everywhere right now, before the Kirk breach can bust Mitch McConnell's "dam" altogether.
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