By: Spencer H. Diamond
Special to the Chronicle

“The Constitution is pretty clear about what is supposed to happen now,” said President Barack Obama during his statement about the tragic loss of Justice Antonin Scalia, my personal legal hero, “Historically, this has not been viewed as a question. I intend to do my job, I expect [the senators] to do their job as well.”

In what would appear to be a never-ending, near-cartoonish, showdown between the president and the Senate, the president has declared he will oppose the ill-fared Republican Senate and nominate a Supreme Court nominee in his final year in the Oval Office. A Supreme Court nominee to replace the white knight of conservatism, no less. The president, once the hero of America’s youth, will now use all of his force to attempt to bypass the GOP senatorial blockade and fulfill his supposed presidential duties.

While this may sound like a fantastic idea, there happens to be one wrinkle in the story: The President has been at the height of hypocrisy for the past four years when it comes to abiding by the Constitution. This decision to nominate, regardless of the reservations of many, is merely yet another anecdote in the diary of a mad strict constitutionalist.

Let us not forget several things. First, in 2006, President Obama himself voted in favor of the filibuster of the conservative Justice Samuel Alito. Though he has admitted his regret in doing so, I have to wonder why it would take nearly 10 years to come to realize his past error. Not to mention for almost 80 years there has not been a Supreme Court appointment in the final year of a president’s term. Especially one where the general public has no idea who the next president will be.

If the president feels the need to flaunt his record of previous appointments, then a conservative would want to cringe at his last two appointees for SCOTUS: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. These two justices have rarely ruled in accordance with the conservative principle of not legislating from the court, and absolutely treat our Constitution as a negotiable, sort of living and breathing document. With such a liberal history of appointments, how can we expect this one to be anything different?

Regardless of where a citizen may fall on the spectrum of politics, it is almost universally agreed on that President Obama has never truly negotiated with the party that now controls over 50 percent of the House and Senate. This is part of the reason why he has not made one change to the Affordable Care Act, the deadly foreign policy which left Iraq in a tragic vacuum, or his economic ideas, for example.

An ideal-driven leadership is fine when the electorate chooses it to be so, but through the Congressional and the current Gubernatorial elections the American people, have made their voice heard that the era of uncompromising policy that is only designed to favor one party is now gone. The era of true constitutional Americanism is sweeping through, and there is no room for a divided government.

Now, the American people have done their job. We should expect the president of the United States to do his.

Spencer H. Diamond is a member of the Republicans of Hofstra University.

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