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Anything else is opinion, and that opinion is shrill and self-centred.
There is nothing that says a president has to give up the responsibility even a day before being replaced.
Precedent is that 14 presidents have appointed judges in their last year and it has happened that a president has made an appointment after losing an election but before leaving office.
The issue should not be based on what one thinks of Trump. The issue is bigger than that.
So many Canadians weighed in on this in a partisan fashion that it is alarming how much the supposedly “American style” of bitter partisan politics has taken stronghold here.
That some politicians have a different position and a supposedly whole new set of principles (this is from both the left and the right) that they expressed when Obama was president is no reason to give up on what is right.
Because Senator Mitch McConnell argues that Obama shouldn’t and Trump should appoint in similar circumstances is an opportunity for us all to point out what a hypocrite he is, not to try to use him to frame our own partisanship.
Politicians are what they are and by nature they are partisan. Shouldn’t the rest of us at least try to be better than that?
The point of law is that it has to be as clear and unequivocal as it can be.
There is a process to change law. We can lobby our elected representatives. We can vote.
But it seems that the more we in the public insist that politics is a team sport outside political parties, the more the “us and them” mentality is free territory for our leaders to act in the interest of themselves and their supporters even more than they always have.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is guilty of various ethical breaches but to his supporters that is just noise from complaining conservatives because Justin is their guy.
Who cares about character when your team is winning?
It is the sort of thinking that leads people to believe that because they have a strong moral sense – a subjective thing – that they are right, that burning and looting and general law-breaking is not only justified but called for.
Perhaps we are not so much increasingly partisan as we are narcissistic. Sounds a lot like Donald Trump.
