Now we are engaged in a great political debate, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met now on a great battlefield of that nation's politics, a battle-boulevard that stretches from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.
We have come to this crossroads to dedicate a vacant seat to that great cause for which many of us have labored, and for which many of us have given our strength, our endurance, our political partisanship, our blood sweat and fears and in some cases our very lives.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this--that we should dedicate this vacant chair.
It is for us, the living, to be now dedicated to the task remaining before us--that from this honored dead Justice we take increased devotion to that cause for which he gave the last full measure of his jurisprudence--that we now highly resolve that this dead Justice shall not have served in vain, and that that timeless Constitution upon which our freedom and liberty has been laid shall not now itself be sacrificed upon the battlefield of partisanship, but that, accordingly, the President "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate," a Justice of the supreme Court, and that:
Our Constitution's prescribed procedure, set forth in perfect ambiguity so that neither one Branch of our government, the Executive, shall presume to dominate the other Branch, the Legislative, nor shall the Legislative obliterate the the Executive. . .
Therefore do we resolve that this embattled chair--our untimely and inconvenient ninth-chair vacancy--can, and should be, and will be, determined and thus fulfilled by us, the living, in this our 21st-century circumstance as it exists here and now, and still yet through the Constitutional protocol that was set before us, lo, these many scores of years ago. . . and furthermore that:
Our government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Glass half-Full
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