Harris campaign rhetoric in the Vatican newspaper

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 07, 2024

So now is the Vatican newspaper is repeating the talking points of the American pro-abortion lobby?

The October 4 issue of L’Osservatore Romano carried a report on the American presidential elections, warning that the re-election of Donald Trump will lead to an “authoritarian remake” of the US government. This article—based entirely on unsupported statements by an “expert” named Federico Romero, who teaches North American history at the University of Florence—appears in the “news” section of the Vatican paper.

(The article itself is, fortuitously, behind a paywall; CWN reports on it here.)

Professor Romero is not the first person to portray Trump as an authoritarian, nor the first to hold him responsible for the polarization of the American political system. What makes his analysis remarkable is not his obvious sympathy for the Harris campaign, but the reasoning that leads him to the conclusion that a Trump victory would cause “an unprecedented twisting of democracy.”

No; the astonishing thing about the L’Osservatore Romano report lies in this sentence, a quote from Romero:

It is a unique election because it is quite clear that, if Trump wins, his political project would be an authoritarian remake of the State and the expulsion of the other part of the United States from the federal and state governments, as already done with the Supreme Court.

The translation is clumsy, but Romero’s meaning comes through: he predicts that if re-elected, President Trump would expel his ideological opponents from the federal and state governments, “as [he has] already done with the Supreme Court.” It is not clear how the “expert” Romero thinks Trump would go about expelling his opponents from state governments. It is undoubtedly true that Trump, like any other newly elected president, would methodically appoint his own people to posts in the executive branch of the federal government replacing Biden loyalists. But let’s look carefully at Romero’s claim about the Supreme Court.

During his term in the White House, Trump did not expel anyone from the Supreme Court. Taking advantage of voluntary resignations, he offered his own nominees, who were confirmed by the Senate. He did nothing that was not clearly within his authority under the Constitution.

(By the way there is a presidential candidate who has suggested an unprecedented overhaul of the Supreme Court—which might not expel the sitting justices but would certainly weaken their voices—to serve obviously partisan purposes. That would be Kamala Harris, the candidate Romero credits with an intention to ease polarization.)

Why, then, does Romero accuse Trump of having taken over the Supreme Court? Presumably because he has been following the presidential campaign, carefully noting the rhetoric of the Harris campaign, which regularly makes exactly that accusation. And what evidence do Harris and her surrogates produce to back that claim? Invariably they point to the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

So a report in the Vatican newspaper—a news story, remember—supports the pro-abortion narrative that the appointment of Supreme Court justices who could not find a “right” to abortion in the Constitution was an offense against democracy.