Catching up Open Thread

I’m happy to report that Mom is heading home from the hospital, after having received the usual excellent, attentive, and extremely kind care I’ve come to expect from Marin General Hospital. I’m catching up with things.

While Mom was in the hospital, and I was staying with her (even the most attentive nursing staff can’t keep up with my Mom’s needs), I assiduously avoided the internet. Since I couldn’t write about the political word, I didn’t want to think about the political world.

The fact is, though, that I always think about the political world. And the thought that kept hitting me over the head was something that Ted Cruz said about Donald Trump during the most recent debate:

[Y]ou cannot, in fact, care about conservative Supreme Court justices and support Jimmy Carter for president. You cannot care about conservative Supreme Court justices and support John Kerry for president, as Donald did. You cannot care about conservative Supreme Court justices and support Harry Reid for Senate majority leader.

And you cannot care about conservative Supreme Court justices and write four checks to Hillary Clinton for her to be president if you care at all about the Second Amendment or religious liberty or anything else.

To me, that’s the difference in a nutshell between Cruz and Trump. No matter his motives — pragmatic business, political ideology, personal friendship, whatever — Donald was willing in 2008 to give Hillary Clinton the power to nominate justices who would destroy the First and Second Amendments.

For more on Cruz’s thoughts about the Supreme Court’s role in American life and politics, please check out his Wall Street Journal opinion piece.