If you wanted to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, what advice would you give him? Let’s see. He ran as the candidate of the people against self-perpetuating elites; as a pro-life constitutional conservative who would appoint justices like Scalia; and as a tough negotiator who knew how get the best deal for his voters.

If your goal was to ruin and humiliate President Trump, and make him a virtual lame duck in his first year in office, you’d want to set a trap like Sen. Udall’s.

So if your goal was to ruin and humiliate President Trump, to split him from his voters and make him a virtual lame duck in his first year in office, you’d want to set a trap that if he triggered it, would expose all three of those claims as empty campaign rhetoric. You’d want to prove that Trump actually fawns on elites and betrays the people; that he was lying about his views on the Constitution and abortion; and that he’s really a gullible sap, in way over his head, who will trade the people’s birthright for a moldy mess of pottage.

Senate Democrat Offers a Suicide Move for Trump

And now there’s a Democratic senator who has exactly the plan to accomplish all that. As CNN reports:

Sen. Tom Udall has an idea that could place both Judge Neil Gorsuch and Judge Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court at the same time.

The Democrat from New Mexico presented the plan Monday morning to Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, as well as to Gorsuch’s team of White House aides and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who’s been attending Gorsuch’s meetings with senators.

His proposal is for Trump to meet privately with Supreme Court justices who are interested in retirement. If one of those justices decided they would be willing to retire, and if Trump promises to nominate Garland, President Barack Obama’s unconfirmed former SCOTUS pick, in their place, then the retiring justice would submit a letter of resignation contingent on that promise.

Then, both Garland and Gorsuch would be voted on simultaneously….

Republicans need eight Democrats to cross over and vote for Gorsuch in order to avoid a Democratic filibuster. Republicans can get around that rule by invoking the so-called “nuclear option,” requiring only a majority to move ahead with voting for the nominee. Udall said he doesn’t support changing any Senate rules.

I bet he doesn’t.

The sheer impudent gall of a Democratic senator proposing such a preemptive surrender for President Trump is almost astounding. After seven years of Barack Obama proposing far-left judicial activists to the Court, and the Republican Senate meekly confirming each of them, in his final months in office he responded to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia by picking Merrick Garland, a firm believer in the fetish of a “living Constitution.” What that phrase really means is that the Constitution’s words are dead as doornails, and may be safely ignored, in favor of what five Harvard or Stanford grads decide the Founders would have written if they were alive today — and went to the “right” schools and held all the “right” opinions.

Aren’t the American People Good Enough to Vote on Laws?

The “living Constitution” amounts, in fact, to a permanent sitting Constitutional convention controlled by the left, plucking one issue after another out of the grubby hands of “deplorable” voters, and enshrining their own policy preferences and moral views as virtual dogma — carved in stone, like Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges. Then any federal, state or local law can be summarily invalidated, if it violates the maxim made up by those five justices, and scrawled between the lines of our founding document.

If Trump accepted Udall’s “deal,” he’d be throwing away a crucial vote, most likely the deciding vote, on the U.S. Supreme Court, giving Barack Obama a do-over appointment.

If Trump accepted Udall’s “deal,” he’d be throwing away a crucial vote, most likely the deciding vote, on the U.S. Supreme Court, essentially giving Barack Obama a do-over appointment to the Court. Why would Udall believe for a second that Trump would roll over like that? Perhaps it is the long years Udall spent in the U.S. Senate, where the GOP did indeed let Democrats walk all over them, playing the Court nominations game like the Washington Generals — you know, the hapless team that suits up and lets itself get creamed by the Harlem Globetrotters.

Does Udall think Trump went through all the abuse and media frenzy, that he’s enduring the worst vilification in the history of American politics, to let Chuck Schumer and company steamroller him on his legacy? Because a key part of what Trump leaves behind will consist in his appointments to these lifetime positions on SCOTUS. If Trump were to hand the Democrats a free seat on that Court, just to avoid having to trash the cheap procedural trick called the judicial filibuster, he might as well build his wall to Mexico with missing sections every five miles, or let the Chinese government write up all of our trade deals. Why not give the U.N. control over America’s handling of refugees, while we’re at it?

Trash the Fake Filibuster

In fact, what Trump really needs to do is to let the Democrats filibuster Gorsuch, and force the GOP to tear up the filibuster. That will give him total freedom of action on his next Court appointment. He can tell Chuck Schumer and company to go fly a kite, and appoint Steve Bannon if he wants to. (Not a bad idea, come to think of it.) Why would Trump throw away that kind of power? Why betray the pro-life voters who elected him?

Sen. Udall seems to have missed what happened in the 2016 election. He thinks that Jeb! or Kasich was elected, someone who will trade away crucial points of principle in order to be well-liked. (Notice how the left is now rehabilitating George W. Bush, once he’s harmless and powerless.) Trumps knows that the left hates him. He has learned to take their lemons and make them into Trump brand lemon vodka. If he were to cave on the Court as Udall is suggesting, Trump might as well go back to running casinos. At least there, the House always wins.