photo credit princeton.edu Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (left) and Robert George, Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence

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President Obama may well himself become Scalia’s replacement on the court. You read that right. Here’s how.

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First: Aboveis a picture of the far right Roman Catholic theocracy advocate extremist Robert George ( Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University) with his best friend Antonin Scalia.

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Together Scalia and Robert George (with a big assist from far right evangelicals like the late Chuck Colson) tried (and largely succeeded) in turning “religious liberty” into a code word for imposing Roman Catholic doctrine on the American people. Robert George is to Princeton what Ted Cruz is to America.

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Now George or his surrogates are conducting their war against Pope Francis and doing all they can to undermine his liberal leanings. Robert George, engaged in a papal pre-emption strike in a piece for the far right First Things. “The Pope has no special knowledge, insight, or teaching authority pertaining to matters of empirical fact,” George wrote.

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On a September afternoon, about 60 prominent Christians assembled in the library of the Metropolitan Club on the east side of Central Park. … At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker. …Alarmed at the liberal takeover of Washington and an apparent leadership vacuum among the Christian right, the group had come together to warn the country’s secular powers that the culture wars had not ended. As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage. FOR 20 YEARS, George has operated largely out of public view at the intersection of academia, religion and politics. … And he is in many ways the public face of the conservative side in the most urgent culture-war battle of the day. The National Organization for Marriage, the advocacy group fighting same-sex marriage in Albany and Trenton, Maine and California, has made him its chairman. Before the 2004 election, he helped a coalition of Christian conservative groups write their proposed amendment to the federal Constitution defining marriage as heterosexual. More than any other scholar, George has staked his reputation on the claim that same-sex marriage violates not only tradition but also human reason. … In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines…. George argues that reason alone shows that heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sex are morally wrong, just as the Catholic Church, classical philosophers and other religious traditions have historically taught. … …At Princeton, George founded an independently financed center, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Conservatives celebrate it for bringing conservative thinking to the campus and for adding “Princeton” to the résumés of young scholars. …George … is plunging deeper into partisan politics. Alarmed at signs that the Republican Party was moving away from cultural issues, he recently founded a new group called the American Principles Project, which aims to build a grass-roots movement around his ideas.

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George, co-author of the Manhattan Declaration and co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, published a law review article and book, “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” with Sherif Gergis and the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson. George was quite proud that Justice Samuel Alito (acting as the co-conspirator with Scalia) cited their arguments in his dissent to the Supreme Court decision overturning part of the Defense of Marriage Act. …

The “Hobby Lobby” decision and legal tactics on the case was Scalia’s and George’s brain child. So was the Wheaton ruling . These cases imposed Roman Catholic doctrine on America in the form of denying women insurance coverage for contraception.

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Scalia and George had a behind the scenes strategy: they began with the so-called Manhattan Declaration saying that Christians didn’t need to obey the government if the government defended the rights of gay men and women. Then they found cases to test this and Scalia worked with various Roman Catholic and evangelical far right foundations to bring these cases forward.

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Now Scalia is dead and the Republican/Robert George hate machine is about to kick into full awing to prevent President Obama from appointing a successor to Scalia. But the Republicans are about to shoot themselves in the foot.

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Paul Campos (a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder) writes that President Obama may well himself become Scalia’s replacement on the court.

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In an article in Salon he lays out a scenario where the obstructionist Senate Republicans deny President Obama the right to name a successor to Scalia, pushing the appointment into the next presidency.

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The result is that either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton name the next justice.

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Anger over the Ted Cruz-led grandstanding (again) by Republicans (these are the guys who shut down the government, remember?) over President Obama’s right to name a justice will contribute to the election of a Democrat for president and also give the Democrats a Senate majority.

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Result?:We can then look forward to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders choosing Barack Obama to succeed Antonin Scalia. Scalia’s death is actually going to work in President Obama’s favor in other ways too.

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Campos writes:

Justices cast their initial votes on cases in a conference, and the task of writing the majority opinion is assigned to a particular justice… But until the decision is formally issued, any justice is free to change the vote he or she cast in the conference. (For example, there is strong evidence that the Affordable Care Act was saved when John Roberts changed his mind after the initial conference vote, thus transforming what was originally the majority opinion in the case into the dissent). This fact has serious practical implications for several important cases the Court is currently considering. For example, it now seems likely that a crucial labor law case that seemed fated to deal a serious and possibly fatal blow to many public sector unions will come out the other way. And Justice Scalia’s death may well have also saved the Obama administration’s most critical climate change regulations. This is because what were poised to be 5-4 decisions will now feature 4-4 votes — and a tie vote in the Supreme Court leaves the law unchanged…. Every four years we hear that the winner of the presidential election may well play a key role in shaping the composition of the Court for decades to come. … Obama will surely take into account that an increasingly radicalized and confrontational GOP is not going to allow its senators to approve anyone to the Court that Democrats would consider minimally acceptable. This suggests he will nominate someone whose rejection by the Senate will do maximum damage to the electoral chances of both the Republican presidential nominee, and of the GOP senatorial candidates who will be in competitive races in November…. … [T]his situation will play out in such a way that public disgust over how a radicalized GOP reacts to Obama’s nomination(s) ends up playing a crucial role in handing both the presidency and the Senate to the Democrats. And should that happen, we can then look forward to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders choosing Barack Obama to succeed Antonin Scalia.