In August of 2018, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech in Kentucky that “one of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'”

In doing so, McConnell violated his oath of office to uphold the Constitution and disenfranchised the voters who put Barack Obama into office, by refusing to consider their president’s selection of Merrick Garland for Supreme Court Justice. That is nothing to be proud of …

President Obama nominated Garland a full 237 days before the 2016 election. McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee violated the plain meaning of Article II, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution. His refusal in effect:

¯ converted the constitutional duty of the Senate to “advise and consent” into an extra-constitutional power to withhold its performance of its duty completely; and

¯ stripped a President of the United States of his constitutional power to meaningfully nominate and appoint “Judges of the Supreme Court.”

If Mitch McConnell pushes through a Trump nominee now to succeed the late Justice Ginsburg — fewer than 40 days before the November election — he will have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that he puts politics above country. Not unconstitutionally as before but without the intellectual honesty and integrity required of representatives entrusted to run our country, as envisioned by our Founders. In the process, McConnell will have again soiled the public trust in our republican form of government, and will have cast a long, foreboding shadow over the Supreme Court’s independence and impartiality for a generation of Americans … Only the court’s reform will restore that trust.

Maurice F. Baggiano, J.D., is a Jamestown resident. He has worked in federal law enforcement, and as a practicing attorney, a distinguished law book author/content editor, and an adjunct faculty member at several colleges/universities. Mr. Baggiano’s Letters to the Editor and op-Eds haven been published by Time Ideas, the Washington Post, The NY Times, the Buffalo News, the Albany Times-Union, and the Jamestown Post-Journal.