Rick Santorum Proclaims Trump as Champion of the Constitution He Hasn’t Even Read

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:14 pm

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Hate brings out the worst in Republicans and they gather to it like stink on, well, you get the picture. So it is hardly any surprise that Rick Santorum is leaping up to support Donald Trump. We just saw The Washington Post editorial board take Trump to task for having no respect (or indeed, knowledge of) the United States Constitution.

Naturally, Rick Santorum says the only guy who can save the Constitution is Donald Trump. Probably, it’s pretty easy to say stupid things like this when you’re on an intellectual level with Sarah Palin, and like Trump, have not read the Constitution yourself:

“I sat at [Antonin Scalia’s] funeral and it just hit me as a wave that the next president of the United States is going to have the chance to replace him and probably two other justices, if it’s a Hillary Clinton, two other justices, and put three more progressives. When I say two other justices, I mean Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both of whom are old and will retire during the Clinton administration, if she’s elected.”

Listen to his mindless drivel courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

This is, of course, because for Republicans, liberals and progressivism are illegitimate ideologies, even though the ideals of the American Revolution were very progressive indeed, based as they were on the liberal Enlightenment. And ironically, because the Founding Fathers broke conservative’s rules (its status quo), Santorum thinks the best thing about Trump is his rule-breaking:

“He breaks the rules and he gets away with it and that’s great. That’s one of the reasons conservatives love him, because he’s able to break the rules, say things that conservatives can’t get away with that are true, and gets away with it.”

Of course, what he says isn’t true. Nine out of ten things he says are not true. His acceptance speech was full of lies. His crime statistics were made up.

Santorum is caught up in the circular thinking that postulates that anything conservatives say is true because if conservatives say it, it is true.

And as Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times earlier this year, while his “attacks on the press and the judicial system are evidence to some of his bracing candor…his comments also sketch out a worldview that many legal experts say is contemptuous of the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

Besides which, it isn’t liberals and progressives who are defenders of the status quo, as Santorum seems to claim; that is conservatism’s job, which leaves Santorum’s reasoning sounding very Palinesque when he seems to be arguing against himself:

“With the two 50-year-old progressives on the Court, Sotomayor and Kagan, plus three that Clinton will add, that’ll be five 50-year-olds who will be on the court for 25-30 years, and they will all subscribe to this theory of judicial practice which is, the Constitution is whatever we say it is.

“[Progressive justices will] just reference their old opinions and say, ‘Well, what we really meant here was this,’ and not even tether it to the Constitution anymore. So if you believe that America is better off governed by five elites who are detached from any kind of control by the anybody, then vote for Hillary Clinton.”

Santorum doesn’t say whom he wants controlling the Supreme Court, but apparently he thinks somebody needs to be telling those justice what to do, as if the Constitution is not clear enough.

Yet Trump, who doesn’t even know the Constitution stops at seven articles, not 9 or worse, 12, is somehow tethered to a document he hasn’t even read. This is modern-day Republican reasoning at its worst. As the Post’s editorial board said, Trump has displayed not only “ignorance” of but “contempt for the Constitution.”

Speaking of breaking rules: As Raoul Lowery Contreras wrote of conservativesat The Hill last year, “we wonder if his disregard and disrespect of the U.S. Constitution and/or lack of knowledge of that document appeals to them also.”

Yes. Yes it does.

Claims that Donald Trump can somehow save the Constitution are so far outside the bounds of our shared reality that Republican rhetoric starts to sound like really bad satire.

Nothing in this mishmash makes the least bit of sense. But then that’s been true of the entire Republican Party for going on two decades, and it shows no signs of getting better.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.