Not Trump’s to fill
Dahlia Lithwick says we should all throw a huge tantrum about the Supreme Court, and scream and scream and scream until we’re sick, because the Republicans stole that god damn vacancy.
The current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.
The seat that became vacant when Antonin Scalia died earlier this year was blocked by the Republican party for 9 months for reasons that were transparently false from the outset. At first the senators obstructed the president’s pick of moderate Merrick Garland because they claimed Obama was a “lame-duck president” with only a year remaining in his term, and the “people” should be allowed, for the first time in history, to decide for themselves. Later, the reasons for obstruction changed when Senate Republicans began to run on the promise to block any nominees put forward by a Democratic president. Virtually all of those senators won their seats back on the strength of that pledge. Smart guys.
For Republicans, keeping the Supreme Court conservative was more urgent than governance or leadership or an independent judiciary. To reward that by meeting President Trump halfway on his nominees is not sober statesmanship. It’s surrender. Senate Republicans are already crowing that they can have a Justice Ted Cruz named in the coming days and seated by February. They can. But it is not his seat.
They stole it.
Realistically, what is left to do, aside from sending fresh fruit and a Vitamix to Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, is to figure out a way to make this a front-page story until January. Our choices now are to make a huge national fuss or to quietly and maturely accede to a Trump nominee, who will assuredly be on board for rolling back Roe v. Wade, protecting religious objectors from general laws, and expanding gun rights. We can hold out hope that Trump’s general lunacy and opportunism will lead him to seat someone wholly unpredictable, a kind of sweeps-week stunt nominee like Michelle Obama or Justice Omarosa or his son Barron. But for all that I have railed against destructive partisanship directed at fragile courts, I am persuaded now that the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.
I doubt the Dems can ever match the Republicans in nihilism.
It’s hard enough fighting with principles against the unprincipled, but what’s even worse in this case is the rabid propaganda machines (such as Fox News) that hobble any chance of getting the electorate to understand or care about the principles at stake.
If there’s one thing recent history has taught us, though, it’s that there is no price to be paid for obstructionism. The Republicans stonewalled pretty much everything that Obama tried to do, up to and including nominating a perfectly acceptable Justice, and paid no price for it politically. To the contrary, they reaped the benefits.
And for every op-ed that deplored such obstructionism, there was at least one thumbsucker by a helpful stooge like Ron Fournier lamenting that if only Obama would just lead, he could get something done. Why, a couple more rounds of golf with John Boehner, or inviting Mitch McConnell over for some bourbon, and surely stuff would get done just like in the days of Tip O’Neill and the Gipper. (Let’s pause for a moment and let Chris Matthews change his pants after that bit of exciting nostalgia.)
Ignore the fact that Boehner and McConnell actually couldn’t socialize with the president more often, for fear of rousing their base’s anger at the sight of “Washington insiders” giving legitimacy to the Kenyan usurper. Just pretend it was all Obama’s fault.
The only down side I see to blanket obstructionism at this point is that it may help unify the Republicans in Congress with the White House by giving them a common enemy. But that may be inevitable, because I find it hard to believe that the same Republican senators who couldn’t muster up the courage to denounce candidate Trump are suddenly going to develop a backbone against President Trump.
There is no price to be paid for REPUBLICAN obstructionism. We are still paying the price for keeping Robert Bork off the court. A lot of Republican temper tantrums about the handful of justices and judges the Dems have obstructed have led most people I talk to into belief that the Democrats are whiny babies who shoot down all the Republican nominees out of spite. Never mind that most Republican nominees sail through with little problem, while filibusters keep seats (not just Supreme seats) unfilled during Democratic administrations. The blocking of judges during Clinton’s administration was enormous; during Dubya, not so much, but you would have thought from listening to the Republican noise machine that the Dems were standing in the way of everything Dubya wanted to do.
There is no price if you are white, male, and heterosexual. Rich doesn’t hurt, either.
(No, not directly quoting:)
Lesley Stahl: How do you feel about Roe v Wade?
Trump: It’s bad.
LS: Do you think the Supreme Court should overturn it?
T: Yes.
LS: What about same-sex marriage?
T: No, that’s settled. There’s nothing to see here.
The moral: We’ll make those women pay!
iknklast @3,
That’s because Republicans have learned how to work the refs, and they do it incessantly.
They’ve even branched out beyond the usual targets in the media. Facebook had a new algorithm ready to implement this summer that would have filtered out a lot of the hoax news sites from people’s news feeds, but scrapped it because they were afraid of another backlash like the one they got earlier in the year over “bias against conservatives.”
I, personally, would like to see an “8-4-4” movement–8 justices for the next four years. We’ll “let the people decide” in 2020.
So long as the electorate returns republican incumbents to a majority; and so long as the Republican Party represents nothing but anarcho-capitalism and superstition, we will have a paralyzed executive and legislative branches of govt. Obama, Clinton, Carter, during all their terms there were only 4 years without a GOP controlled Congress. And the faux-progressives blame the presidents for not making it rain jelly-beans.
I for one am deliriously happy it does not rain jelly beans.
Can we try for Skittles instead?