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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

McConnell is pretty transparent about his hypocritical political bullshit:

> "Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell told supporters in Kentucky on Tuesday when asked what he would do if a Supreme Court justice died in 2020 while President Trump was still in office

> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/oh-wed-fi...

edit: Am I really getting downvoted for pointing out how the current administration already said it would handle this?

edit #2: Individual Republicans are declaring they're against rushing an appointment before the election (https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1307113546136784897).

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McConnell has done more harm to the USA than any other politician I can think of in recent memory.

This.

Seeing trump as a cause and not a symptom or as the leading disaster for American democracy is a very common distraction.

McConnell is the heart of all of it. He is nothing but an appetite for power. He’ll do anything. No morals whatsoever (and I say that neutrally, as a fact and not a moral judgement.)

And he wins.

McConnell is just doing what his constituents want. Otherwise, they wouldn't have voted for him repeatedly since 1984.

EDIT: One might argue that Mr. McConnell correctly anticipated the desires of the USA electorate because in November of 2016 they expressed a wish for more conservative judges in federal courts. If the voting public was outraged by McConnell's actions, one might expect they'd vote accordingly.

McConnell's constituents = half of Kentucky, so ~2 million people. Meanwhile ~40 million Californians have zero say in the process.

That is because the people of the USA don't want the ~40e6 people in California to be able to dictate policy for the ~2 million people in Kentucky. Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.

> Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.

This doesn't follow. There is no way to amend the Constitution by a national popular vote so the opinion of the majority of Americans is irrelevant to the question of any Amendment's passage.

A more likely reason such an Amendment wouldn't exist is that a majority of states favor the status quo, because most states are small and benefit from their current outsized representation in government.

One of the mechanisms for beginning the amending of the USA constitution is via a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress. The USA House of Representatives assigns political power approximately proportionally to population and it has never passed any proposed amendment to proportionally elect Senators or delegates of the Electoral College.

Source: Article V

Edit: Corrected 3/4 -> 2/3

Edit2: I stand corrected. The Bayh-Celler proposal was passed by the House and filibustered in the Senate in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

> One of the mechanisms for amending the USA constitution is via a 3/4 vote of both houses of Congress.

I believe this is factually incorrect. I'll offer Article V of the Constitution as my citation. Do you have a contrary citation to support this claim?

40e6 people in California aren't a bloc. The blueness/redness of a state is nothing more than the arbitrary balance of urban vs rural population. States are "purple" in actuality.

The major geographic divide in US politics is urban vs rural, not state vs state

It’s not like Mitch can singlehandedly control the whole senate.

> It’s not like Mitch can singlehandedly control the whole senate.

He's Senate Majority Leader. That's literally exactly what he does.

Besides, he's whipped his party so hard they basically never break rank. Even Mitt "I'm not like the others" Romney votes with him nearly 100% of the time.

His power as whip is not absolute. It's not like a parliamentary system where they are actual consequences for not voting the party line.

Take a look at any number of votes in the past year. There are plenty of Republicans who don't vote on party line (Republican and Democratic)

> It's not like [there] are actual consequences for not voting the party line.

There absolutely are, they just happen to be a side-channel in this particular system.

If you don't vote the party line then you get shown the door during your next election. They turn off the money spigot and nominations stop coming and they help your opponents (same party) get the R nomination. None of the current R senators have the backbone to go against that. Oh they say they will but when the day comes to vote, it's all just hot air.

Yes...that’s how the government works. I’d recommend taking a civics course.

We thankfully don’t (yet) live in a country where New York, LA, and Chicago control everything.

Yes, instead we live in a country where a few small rural states wield vastly outsized influence.

So much better!

Of the ten least-populous states, half are solidly Republican and half are solidly Democratic.

Why should the vote for president of someone in Wyoming be worth 5.5 times as much as a voter in California?

Because that's the only way there would be a federal government in America.

What choice would you have made in 1787?

We're way beyond 1787.

The Reapportionment Act of 1929 is the cause of the worst distortions.

It fixes the HoR at 435, and is the main cause of the gross imbalance of power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

Actually, it doesn't.

Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.

As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.

Yes but the Electoral College is House+Senante.

So Wyoming gets 4 EC votes.

So... WY gets 4 EC votes with it's 578k population.

My state of NC only gets 15 with it's population of almost 11M.

In what universe is that fair or just?

The alternative view is that CA, MA, and NY already get a Democrat candidate 95/270 or 35% of the way to the Presidency with just 20% of the population. Do those states really need a greater impact?

That's rather a disingenuous way to twist the numbers.

Those states are 20% of the population and 17% of the EC.

By taking advantage of the tiny states the EC can be won with less than 30% of the vote

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-pres...

A universe where were the United States of America, not just America.

We were supposed to be a group of states with a fairly limited federal government. I think it’s really unfortunate that’s been largely done away with.

"Fair and just" is out the window as soon as others get to decide how the fruits of 40% of my labor gets spent without my consent. At this point, we might as well just change the rules as we go along because you can't really point to the system we have now and say "it's fair" or "just" in a 100% clearly defined and unambiguous sense that we can all agree on.

His constituency is all of Kentucky. Senators do not split their states, they represent it as a whole.

McConnell rules through the consent of half the senate, not alone.

This is literally the purpose of the senate. We are a union of states, and the senate is where each state is granted equal power. One could argue that states should have been defined differently, but the point was that large states should not have absolute control over small states.

Edit: I'm loving the downvotes without comments. They're clear indication that some people are either not arguing in good faith or that they simply do not understand how and why the us is set up the way it is.

The only reason Mitch Connell withheld the nomination was to prevent a vote he would lose. Kentucky's representative prevented a vote where California's representatives would have had a say. Kentucky decided that California did not need to be consulted on this matter. This sort of behavior is hostile to representative government.

They do have a say. They're free to contact their senators just like citizens from all the other states (on either side of the issue).

There is the chance that his constituent's mostly just vote for a Republican and would still vote for him either way.

> If the voting public was outraged by McConnell's actions, one might expect they'd vote accordingly.

This is nonsense. Trump got three million fewer votes than Clinton.

No, it's nonsense because only Kentucky votes for McConnell

Harry Reid, he's the one that ruined congress by changing the rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid

Harry Reid was warned of the long-term consequences and he ignored them.

Had Reid not pulled the 'nuclear option' the filibuster from the minority would stop the confirmation.

That's a fantastical interpretation. Reid pulled the nuclear option to stop Republicans from refusing to do their job (approve judges). McConnell would have pulled the nuclear option himself as soon as he got the majority, regardless of what Reid did.

More than Trump? McConnell is at least a professional politician and not a washed-up reality TV heir.

It's beautiful to see someone like McConnell, who understands political power and is able to use it fully and legally w/o overstepping. If Democrats had someone his equal then they would be pleased too.

Please remember that luck (chance) is an important and sometimes decisive component in conflict. Today it seems the Republicans are lucky; who knows what the future will bring.

> It's beautiful to see someone like McConnell, who understands political power and is able to use it fully and legally w/o overstepping. If Democrats had someone his equal then they would be pleased too.

Regardless of which side you're on - I don't think that's a worthwhile basis for political discourse and shouldn't be the modus operandi for what basically determines the development of a country.

Then again, you're right of course - the fact that McConnell and other don't actually overstep in legal terms just shows that the rule set isn't suitable for the current political climate in a time which is shaped by disregard of norms and mutual respect.

People are probably reacting to some combination of unnecessary partisanship and the false equivalency. McConnell stated that appointments should not be made near the end of term while the White House and Senate are split between different parties. That is not the case now, so it's hard to see how you can call him hypocritical. You can disagree, but I think you could find a more constructive way to disagree than that post.

What's more "unnecessary partisanship" then refusing to follow the Constitution because the President is of a different Party (a concept which is not part of the Constitution)?

> (a concept which is not part of the Constitution)?

And which was very much worried about and warned against by the founders, even if they immediately fell into it themselves.

Are you arguing that the Constitution requires judicial appointments to be made within a certain time frame? Where in the Constitution are you getting that from? It's certainly not in the appointments clause, or anywhere else that I can see.

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