McConnell: OK To Consider SCOTUS Nominees In An Election Year
posted by Winston Smith at
10:04 AM
Tuesday, October 09, 2018
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3 Comments:
So here's the one thing I think is usually overlooked with the Merrick Garland thing, if Ds won the presidency in 2016, there were more than enough moderate republicans to approve the nominee after the election. I'm pretty sure Graham, Murkowski, and McCain would have accepted that, probably more. It's one thing to hold a seat open until the results of a pending election are in, another thing to do it for another four years (maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so).
Dems basically needed to do one thing to get their pick: beat Donald Trump in a presidential election. I think it's hard to stress enough how simple that should have been.
Well, that seems like a pretty sensible point to me, Anon... But it doesn't change the fact that McConnell cooked up an ad hoc rule and gained a *huge* advantage from it. And it isn't just this one. This whole thing started--IMO--because the Pubs refused to confirm Obama's judges. That was flat-out obstructionism. Was it against the rules? No...but it *was* cheating by stretching the rules and contorting them into an unrecognizable form.
Sure, Reid triggered the nuclear option...but I think it was an at least somewhat reasonable response. Then the Pubs just refuse to consider Garland...again, they have a story about how they're justified...but it's really thin. Sure, the Dems *could* have gotten around it...but they didn't.
It seems to me kinda like when team A wins a game as a result of obvious cheating at the last minute, and some people respond: well, they could have won if they hadn't let it get that close to begin with.
I just don't buy that sort of argument.
"It seems to me kinda like when team A wins a game as a result of obvious cheating at the last minute, and some people respond: well, they could have won if they hadn't let it get that close to begin with."
The problem is it wasn't actually cheating. It's definitely hardball, but all within the rules. And even the election year exception has actual precedent. The McConnell quote in that article is pretty consonant with what I think would have happened too: Dems win the presidential election, McConnell would have given in (although maybe not).
And here's probably the more difficult issue. We now know plainly how fargone the progressive academic establishment is. The judicial appointments of the Dems would have given them virtually unchecked authority. Republicans could see that risk plainly, because they bear virtually all of it. Maybe Obama was preternaturally gifted at pulling the reasonable few from the ideologically possessed masses, but I find that frankly unlikely. Can you blame the Republicans for finding any lever they had to prevent that? And the net result of conservative judicial nominations are people who are committed to rolling back arrogation of power by the judicial branch, which is the true root cause of this mess.
That said, I don't want to belabor this. Hardball politics is going to piss people off, I can't blame you for being angry about it. I just think after a few years it'll net out to the better in this case.
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