As President Donald Trump openly banks on a conservative Supreme Court majority to carry him through the election, high-profile conservative attorney Ben Ginsberg is warning Republican senators that Trump’s rhetoric could complicate their efforts to fast-track a SCOTUS nomination.
In a Washington Post op-ed published on Tuesday night, Ginsberg asserted that Trump’s persistent effort to delegitimize the upcoming elections “threatens the party that he heads, both now and in the longer term.”
“Most immediately, the President’s merger of his election-fraud message with the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice puts Republican senators in an uncomfortable position,” the lawyer wrote. “Trump has argued that confirming a new justice is ‘very important’ to winning any post-election cases. This casts aspersions on the justices’ independence and makes confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett a cornerstone of Trump’s election chaos strategy.”
The President’s comments “poses problems” for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and GOP incumbents fighting to keep their seats, and also “tarnishes Republican senators’ reasoning” for ramming through a confirmation before the elections, Ginsberg argued.
“They can regain some credibility by exerting their leverage over timing and insisting that the President commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses,” the attorney wrote.
Ginsberg — who used to be one of the most prominent proponents of the mass election fraud myth and who served as the Bush campaign attorney during the 2000 Florida recount debacle — also repeated his whiplash-inducing assertion that proof of widespread election fraud, particularly as it relates to Trump’s false claims about mail-in voting, “doesn’t exist,” which Ginsberg had admitted in a previous op-ed in the Washington Post in early September.
