Politics & Power Quote by Jay Alan Sekulow

Sekulow’s line performs a neat rhetorical jailbreak: it narrows “obligation” from a constitutional duty to a partisan mandate, then treats that reframing as self-evident. The first sentence pretends to be procedural realism - presidents aren’t required to chase consensus - but it’s really stage-setting. By clearing away the civics-class expectation of broad legitimacy, he makes room for a more muscular claim: the president’s “obligation” is ideological purity.

The phrasing is lawyerly in the most strategic sense. “Consensus appointment” is cast as optional, even faintly naive, while “judicial conservative” is treated like the only responsible category. He’s not arguing that a conservative nominee would be good; he’s arguing that anything else would be a dereliction. That’s a powerful pivot because it converts preference into duty, and duty into moral cover.

The subtext is a tug-of-war over who gets to define the rules of democratic restraint. Sekulow is speaking into the long-running project to normalize courts as the spoils of elections rather than institutions that require cross-partisan legitimacy. The casual “gonna do” is doing work, too: it signals inevitability, an insider’s confidence, the sense that the outcome is already settled and objections are just noise.

Contextually, this sits in the post-Bork, post-Federalist Society era where judicial selection is openly branded. “Consensus” becomes a punchline; “conservative” becomes the credential. Sekulow’s intent isn’t to persuade skeptics so much as to discipline allies: stop flirting with moderation, demand the payoff.