Readers React: There’s only one legitimate nominee to the Supreme Court: Merrick Garland

To the editor: In his column encouraging President Trump to select his nominee to the Supreme Court from among the several names he mentioned during the 2016 campaign, it appears that Jonah Goldberg omitted an important fact regarding Trump’s list.

In May 2016, when Trump “issued” his first list, there was already a list. In fact, there was actually a judge selected by a sitting U.S. president, whose nomination was stonewalled by Senate Republicans for nearly a year and finally abandoned.

I suggest that Goldberg read the op-ed article by Conor Friedersdorf that was published the same day. It also contains a reference to a Trump list, one that includes the unconstitutional acts committed by this president during his short time in office.

I suggest that Trump would prefer to have justices in the court who will be complicit in his dismantling of the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens by our Constitution and his utter disregard for the rule of law.

Geoffrey Robinson, Hollywood

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To the editor: Democratic hysteria in the age of Trump is a source of mirth for this politically independent, pro-choice observer of the abortion battlefield now that our president is about to nominate another conservative justice to the Supreme Court.

It may come as a surprise to some that one of our most liberal justices and an outspoken advocate of abortion rights, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has long criticized the legal foundation of that decision. She has stated that basing Roe on a constitutional right to privacy was wrong, preferring to see the legalization of abortion as a question of equal protection.

In order for women to be equal to men, they must have control over their own fertility. In other words, reposing control of reproductive rights in any government would diminish the legal status of women under the Constitution.

To criticize the legal reasoning behind an accepted precedent like Roe, even desiring to snip here and there to accommodate some well-reasoned state restrictions, should not occasion the degree of distemper we see in progressive precincts.

Paul Bloustein, Cincinnati

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