Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, a replacement was nominated in March of 2016, and because Scalia's seat had become vacant during an election year, the Senate would not even consider a nomination from the president [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
What happened with Garland had happened numerous times before:
> In short: There have been ten vacancies resulting in a presidential election-year or post-election nomination when the president and Senate were from opposite parties. In six of the ten cases, a nomination was made before Election Day. Only one of those, Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s nomination by Grover Cleveland in 1888, was confirmed before the election.
By contrast, if Trump doesn’t put up a nominee, it will be literally unprecedented.
In any case, the refusal was a further erosion of any semblance of working towards the good of the country with people of opposing ideologies. The same goes for the increased frequency of government shutdown threats and occurrences.
Really, if those practices had stood for so long on norms, they should have been codified into law already. But the Congress, regardless of party, doesn’t like to cede any power. It’s equally unlikely that if the Democrats take control they’ll do anything about it either. I’m vague on what it would entail—it’s been a while since I read up on it—but another hurdle might be that it would take an amendment rather than a law. Regulating what the Congress does is explicitly harder than making laws for the rest of us.
Which isn't to say that there's no point in purporting to do so: you may hope to require a politically costly public vote (avoidance of which was a significant feature of the Garland no-hearing: with nobody else "on the record," outrage focused solely on the politically-safe McConnell). How effective this is isn't really clear though: voters seem to usually want "their side" to take full, uncompromising advantage when they are on top, and increased polarization means that the fear of alienating independents/moderates isn't as much of an issue, because there aren't any of them left.
Rules and procedures such as the filibuster are weaker still, as they require only a majority of a single house, and no cooperation from the President. We've seen that borne out as the parties out of power became more likely to use the Senate's procedures to stall the party in power, and the fairly quick recent dismantling of those procedures in a bipartisan fashion.
Constitutional amendments can do all sorts of things and their high barriers to passage make them solidly entrenched, but it's very difficult to imagine any issue commanding the necessary supermajorities to pass an amendment on any subject in today's America.
As for Democrats or Republicans in power after the election curbing this kind of partisanship, I wouldn't bet on it. There may be some pushes to try to codify
Of course, I'm splitting hairs between "refused to consider" and "voted against". But it's similarly splitting hairs to say that the party of the president makes meaningful difference as well.
Frankly, there's no good faith interpretation of McConnell's stance here as anything other than (ab)using his power to shape the judiciary.
Of course it does! The Constitution splits the nomination/confirmation process between two political branches. The process is supposed to be political!
He will do whatever it takes to hold on to his minority power. He did it with Obama and has already hinted ~2 hours after RBG died he'll happily do a 180 on his previous position this time around when he has the chance.
But the argument that "it's OK for us to do it, because they would" seems a bit thin.
It's OK to loot this store because if I don't someone else will...
And it's OK to do anything I like as long as I can point a finger and say "but he'd do it too"
So, yeah, this is a textbook case of hipocrasy, but being hipocratic doesn't matter as long as we win.
The reality of the situation is that in the US one party constantly pushes boundaries and test limits. The other party then adjusts to attempt to counteract that. Yet it’s sold as “both sides are just as bad as each other”
Court expansion hasn't happened yet, but if it does:
1. Them's the rules; sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. (Or: Live by the rules, die by the rules.) (Or: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?)
2. What you call the "structural features of our government and institutions" are meant to serve the people, not vice versa. It's idolatry to put those features on a pedestal and declare them to be immutable. Presuming adequate protection of genuine minority rights, it's not illegitimate for a democratically-elected government to use lawful means to try to restructure existing institutions in pursuit of the majority's felt political needs.
In this case, the left is marching forward with all sorts of new policies—often ostensibly to deal with a societal problem, but causing more problems because the policy does not derive from first principles.
The founders explicitly said that they didn't intend the system to be partisan, and indeed warned against the dangers of partisanship.
Of course they themselves formed parties a few years later. They weren't as wise as everyone seems to think.
I see a common irrational theme of "let's change the rules because they didn't work out in my favor this time". I don't understand the logic behind this.
If anything, governors should have less power, not more. Decisions should be made on a smaller scale, states are too big for a one-size-fits-all model. And I certainly wouldn't want governors hand picking our senators.
[1] - https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/14/pennsylvania-j...
As an aside, Breitbart is one of the least trustworthy sources, and citing it does not help your argument.
Details on why you don't like the judge and which media outlet I referenced (i honestly just googled the story and grabbed the first one I saw) digresses from my point. And fyi once you digress from the main topic and shift to sub-aspects (without actually addressing the main point), it usually means you're arguing in bad faith, or your cognitive dissonance is kicking in. It's a mechanism used by closed-minded and stubborn people...Food for thought.
My own opinion is that the orders are constitutional.
IMO they didn't work out in anyone's favor. Our country is a mess, and the majority of people dislike both of the 2 major ruling parties.
I can read. I was referring to "The process is supposed to be political!" And by political, the implication is partisan, because otherwise it would be true by definition, and thus an uninteresting claim not worthy of ending in an exclamation point.
They did. The danger to the country is actually when they agree.
What happened here is that the Senate refused to compromise, and simply put the government in a holding pattern until they could get a more "agreeable" executive in office. Is that the way separation of powers was intended to work? I think not.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/02/supreme-court-vacancies-i...
1) Going back to the 1800s is routine in the legal world to understand what is accepted practice in our system. After all, the relevant rules haven’t changed since 1789. Aren’t examples from people who created this system particularly relevant to understanding how it’s supposed to work?
2) The SCOTUSblog article goes through the exact same examples as the National Review article for the 20th century. The only difference is that the National Review article looks at whether different parties control the Presidency/Senate. What is “propaganda” about that? The Senate and Presidency are political branches that are supposed to be at odds, potentially. Is there any reason to assert that this political rivalry shouldn’t extend to Supreme Court appointments? Is it “propaganda” to even posit the idea?
Moreover, stopping a vote entirely? That's unprecedented. Had there been a vote on Garland, he almost certainly would have been appointed. Many of the moderate Republicans in the senate, facing elections, would not have been able to justify voting him down to their constituents.
For the National Review to leave those pieces out is dishonest. I'm also not just referring to that article. The National Review has been dishonest propaganda for a while, making dishonest arguments that manipulate the facts (usually by omission or careful selections as here, but occasionally outright lying) to justify the actions of what has become a fascist party.
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-review/national-review...
> In a 1986 New York Times op-ed (3/18/86), Buckley urged that ‘everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”
For some perspective, there were only 31 states at the time.
And the response is to demand something that actually would be unprecedented: packing the senate? Which only Democrats have done before, under circumstances where it was obviously to coerce the Supreme Court into deciding cases differently. Acting like Democrats hold the moral high ground here is utterly absurd.
The idea that a Supreme Court opening should never be filled when the President and Senate are opposing parties is utterly absurd.
It's true that the Constitution wasn't written like Ethereum to preclude all attempts to undermine it with bullshittery like refusing to even put matters up to a vote. That doesn't mean it's at all moral to ignore it.
Also, was "Packing the Senate" a typo? FDR threatened but did not pack the Court. "Packing the Senate" is a Republican tradition (not that the parties mean much consistently, going back centuries), which even a blatant partisan couldn't avoid admitting:
https://www.newsmax.com/michaeldorstewitz/democracy-republic...
And slaveholders (the spiritual inspiration of modern Republicans) had manipulated the Court to themselves since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Circuits_Act
The Roberts Court disenfranchised millions of Democratic voters by gutting the Civil Rights Act. The fight over the Supreme Court's composition is a fight over pure electoral power.
It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
There are lots of things to argue but that isn't one of them.
Further, there’s this: https://thehill.com/regulation/454463-ginsburg-dismisses-cou...
I'm trying to think of a plausible vehicle for arguing that if the Senate refuses to vote on a nomination within a reasonable time, then that refusal (i) constitutes a waiver of the right to withhold consent and therefore (ii) is deemed consent.
(Not saying you're wrong. If I repeat something, I like to have direct sources)
He’s basically that the partisan makeup of the Senate as of the most recent election should be the controlling factor.
It has the veneer of a neutral rule, and that’s all they need.
https://mobile.twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1307121192516...
There's always another election coming up.
Obama was not a lame duck when Scalia died. McConnell et al redefined the term to suit their needs. As they will no doubt redefine it now.
They’ve shown up at elections, they’ve shown up for local elections, they’ve worked for every single advantage in power they could get. I mean these are the chaps who suffered a massive electoral defeat to Obama the first time and found their mettle by saying “one term president” like a mantra. They converted that into a fight for every micro meter.
Eventually anyone m would also realize that “winning” (at all costs) is the strategy that works and adopt it. The best strategies get adopted by market players.
The media environment for the past many decades now ensures that bipartisanship won’t work either.
Maybe it’s an incorrect cultural reading on my part,
>in the last 4 years
I’m talking 30 years. The last 4 years are just end results of other forces.
Also - america has never produced an event like the trump presidency. Does that feature when we discuss abuse of power in the last 4 years?
I know of no Democrat action that is comparable.
Not saying this is only the last 4 years. I agree, at least 30 years. But no, it is not the action of a single party.
I don't think anybody can argue in good faith that it is equally incumbent upon the Democrats to act in a manner consistent with principles argued for and precedents set by Mitch McConnell.
I am more annoyed by the fact that the supreme court has become a political arena. Making laws should be the responsibility of the elected legislator. A court, any court, should merely arbitrate on the conformity of legal disputes to these laws. If they acted that way, no one would really care who gets nominated to the supreme court. It is because the supreme court has taken the habit of ruling on matters that should be left to the legislator and effectively to make new laws that it has become a bitter fight for nominations.
I see the same power grab happening in Europe and am equally worried about it. No power should be given without accountability.
That's a weird way of saying "nominated a candidate via the regular process".
How could this be done? Political issues are in front of the court every day and minute. This makes it immensely political. How could then those mere arbitrators be non-political?
It was always political. It will always be.
> It is because the supreme court has taken the habit of ruling on matters that should be left to the legislator and effectively to make new laws that it has become a bitter fight for nominations.
Uhm. You know this is also something that has been going on forever, especially in every "common law" system.
https://supremecourtpress.com/chance_of_success.html
And in the majority of those cases the SC does only instruct the lower court on that specific case, refraining from creating new law as much as possible.
France is a "civil law" country. Courts there cannot "make new laws", they can only invalidate them. (And as far as I know this applies in general to all civil law countries.)
The German Supreme Court has, on two occasions, declared new constitutional rights: the right to informational self-determination (when deliberating a census process law) and the right to integrity of data processing systems (when outlaying voting computers). I don't know if that counts though since technically they argued that other constitutional rights implied these rights (but weren't mentioned explicitly because the German Basic Law was drafted in 1949).
The reality is that if we had a Democratic President and Senate, nobody on the left would be arguing that we have to hold off until the election. Chuck Schumer would no doubt be insisting that the Senate "do [its] job", as he did in 2016. [1]
It's hard to fault McConnell for doing precisely what he was elected to do -- confirm conservative judges and justices.
[1] https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/701953299268902912
Now if you think that political appointments are a moral matter rather than a balance of power within the constitution matter, it's not a bridge that I have to sell you, it's a planet.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2719115/Senate-SC...
Also:
1. Don't impeach a president in an election year.
2. If dems wanted their adversaries to respect unwritten norms, maybe they should have refrained from baselessly accusing the nominees of gang rape (Justice Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas).
3. A SC Judge vote needs BOTH WH and Senate. That was not the case in 2016 regardless of who said what. That is the case this time. It's the President's prerogative to nominate, and the Senate's prerogative to confirm.
4. This time, it would also most likely be a contested election. So not having a full supreme count will be a disaster.
Btw, I am NOT a fan of McConnell. But this case is very different.
> Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it." [the supreme court seat]
This is not a normal government.
I don't think anyone misunderstands the situation - McConnell is going to do whatever is most expedient to get a Supreme Court composition that he likes. Any specific justification is mostly cosmetic - Senate has the power, and the controller of the Senate uses the power.
Power grabbing is the game.
I believe the first time a SC nominee was blocked was Roger Taney in 1835. This is politics and happens, as a general principle, regularly by both parties.
Because McConnell didn't care a bit about the people expressing the next Justice, he was more simply scared as fuck of losing that vote despite theoretically having a majority.
Since this is HN I will paraphrase Bryan Cantrill: "Do not fall into the trap of trying to anthropomorphize McConnell. You need to think of him the way you think of a lawnmower".
The narrative that Garland would have been confirmed if only he’d gotten a vote assumes that McConnell didn’t have the support of his caucus in what he did. That’s an incorrect assumption. They could have removed him and done what they wanted to do if there was some groundswell of support for Garland in the Republican Party. There wasn’t, they supported McConnell, and Garland wasn’t brought to a vote. That’s just how politics works.
If you're trying to be thorough, though, you should probably mention that Reagan's first selection for that seat was controversial because of his involvement in the the post-Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre," as well as the general suspicion that he would try to reverse Roe v. Wade and other civil rights-related rulings of preceding decades. Reagan's second selection withdrew his name from consideration before even being nominated, so I'm not sure why he's even relevant here.
I get that you're trying to make a political point, but there's simply no evidence that Democrats would have behaved like McConnell's GOP (perhaps more aptly described as the post-Gingrich GOP) did in 2016.
There is ample evidence that Democrats would have behaved like McConnell did. For example, their threats to pack the Supreme Court in 2019. (After their threats to pack the Supreme Court under FDR gutted large parts of the constitution.) The fact is that Democrats don’t perceive conservatives as legitimate players in the political process. That’s why they continually raise alarm about conservative Supreme Court nominees, even though in 40 years of a conservative majority on the court, not a single major liberal precedent has been overturned.
Democratic “threats” made in 2019, post-Merrick Garland, have zero bearing on their hypothetical behavior in 2016, pre-Merrick Garland and the shattering of norms that his (non)hearings represented.
I’m not a Democrat, but, from the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem like they have a real problem with right-leaning politicians or judges. I can understand why they might not view those who seem to be pursuing a return to the pre-Civil Rights era as wholly legitimate, but they’ve adopted plenty of relatively conservative positions over the years (just look at the record of their current presidential candidate!). The American Left has only recently begun to show its face again, for example, after decades of absence, and the Democratic Party has long seemed to harbor more resentment toward that group than moderate conservatives.
I’m also not a demographer, but I don’t think many would consider a potential 6-3 conservative majority on the SC to be at all representative of the US population. To me, that seems like the real legitimacy crisis here, not whether Democrats think of conservatives as legitimate political actors (spoiler alert: I think it’s safe to say they view conservatives about as favorably as conservatives view them).
You’re wrong to say that Republicans hate democrats as much as democrats hate republicans. There is pretty much no liberal opinion you could say that would get you personally attacked at a federalist society meeting. There are a wide range of mainstream conservative views you’d best not say in a similar context among liberals.
I think this behavior could very possibly be caused by there being more conservative justices. If there were 6 liberal justices and 3 conservative ones you'd probably see the 3 vote as a block and the 6 break rank.
The supreme court is going to mostly issue opinions that are close to it's median member. And the more liberal or conservative justices on the supreme court the more liberal or conservative that viewpoint will be. And thus the more likely the more moderate members will be to break rank.
Constrain the operational gamut of law enforcement (aka “defund the police”).
Abortion is a medical health issue and a woman’s right to choose.
I dunno, there’s plenty that will get be undue attention at a Federalist meeting, and some things I could say that would put my life on the line (remembering home invasions, fire bombings and an assassination of a surgeon involved in abortions).
Just last night I had to walk away from a conversation because the other party got so heated just because I suggested it's very likely the new supreme court won't overturn roe v wade.
What was your reasoning for your side of the argument? Were you arguing based on the GOP history of not successfully overturning RvW, or were you challenging the other side's assumptions about GOP wanting to overturn RvW? Were you playing the ball or the player?
Which is basically two fold. Roe vs wade is very popular. Last pre research poll I found said even among Republicans less people wanted to overturn it than not overturn it. 49 to 48.
If the Republican justices fall along these same lines it won't get overturned.
Which brings us to our next argument Which is basically the supreme court is very reluctant to overturn major constitutional court cases that have stood for almost half a century.
So will the supreme court throw out 50 years of precedence to overturn an issue that 70-80% of the population and 50% of Republicans disagree with overturning?
It's not impossible but doesn't seem likely.
That explains a lot :)
You must have some very interesting "ordinary" friends. You're also trying to compare the federalist society, a high-brow legal organization composed of highly educated lawyers, with ordinary, likely much less educated people. Try going to a Trump rally and holding up a black lives matter sign. I'm sure you'll have plenty of intellectually stimulating conversation.
Whereas Mitch's philosophy is "no candidate will be entertained as being possibly acceptable or suitable".
Trying to drawn parallels between the two is grasping at best, disingenuous at worst.
That's called compromise, and it is how a government should function, but Republicans have lost all ability to do that and so we have stalemate after stalemate, no covid stimulus, no attempt to compromise on anything. Democrats are fine with compromise, to a point, but the republicans have to meet in the middle, not take their ball and go home like they always fucking do.
People are upset because the media played it up as such a miscarriage of justice, but the truth is the senate wouldn’t have confirmed him and so they didn’t vote for a hearing.
The Democrats of course can and obviously will do the same the next time they have opposition in the senate - and would have done the same, I’d bet, if the situation was flipped then.
I actually think many don’t understand this as it was really propagandized on Twitter, etc as some massive deal, but having the hearing wouldn’t have changed anything.
This is not necessarily true. McConnell does this to protect his fellow senators from having to decide between party and state, potentially hurting their re-election chances if they side with the party. Majority leaders regularly stop things going to vote not because they wouldn't pass, but rather because it can create strife and bad feelings within the party.
People keep trying to argue that McConnell isn't being a hypocrite, he's just following precedent. But for that to be true, we need to (a) find a time before 2016 when the Senate prevented a Supreme Court nominee from even getting a vote on the Senate floor in an election year, and (b) the Senate needs to specifically cite the upcoming election as a reason. So far, no one seems to be able to point to that supposedly precedent-setting case. And that's before we throw in McConnell's new claim as of yesterday that such a precedent only applies when the Senate majority and the President are from two different parties, a condition which, it's worth noting, was never mentioned by him or any of his supporters in 2016.
In strictly legal terms, McConnell gets to do what he wants. But the claim that he was following some previously established norm by denying Garland a vote in 2016 but not denying a new nominee a vote in 2020 is simply a lie.
And that was my point.
I read about it extensively at the time from many on the right, and the left - that was the entire grounds for it happening. That McConnel himself may not have explicitly called out the Senate majority in his prominent press interviews was because it was totally obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with politics why, and therefore why beyond saying “it’s an electron year” would he need to keep clarifying? He just wasn’t assuming the insane amount of bad faith everyone would give him, incl. people like yourself.
So no, you don’t have some subtle understanding that no one else besides you and “your side” is getting at all.
Again, let me reiterate, because it seems you’re really trying to find something here: it was discussed on the right extensively, explicitly mentioning the Senate majority factor at the time, in 2016, and was generally well understood on the right. In fact the rights news writers were sort of flabbergasted and writing about how it’s being propagandized to look super bad when in fact it was not. I can’t even believe you’re trying to argue that wasn’t the case - talk about a straw-man.
Avoiding the vote altogether as opposed to having it and rejecting it was indeed unique, but not hypocritical. Simply put, he had the power to do that as the majority in the Senate. You can be upset about it, but I suspect you’re really just upset because your side lost or you have some gut revulsion towards McConnel, not because it was some grand betrayal - because it didn’t change a single thing in terms of outcomes, not even in terms of slippery slopes. The Democrats are totally free to do the same the next time this situation comes up, and they will and are expected to, and that too wouldn’t change a thing, and I’m sure some idiot Republicans will whine about it as well...that’s politics.
Would have played out the exact same way if political tables were turned.
Or just gonna stop there since that's what you'd like to believe?
If there was an instance where the other party did this the GOP would be slapping them around the ears with it. So since they’re not doing that, I assume there’s no instance they can use.
There are no principles, just power struggles.
If HRC was president, McConnell would follow his 2016 policy. With Trump president he'll make a new policy.
There are no repercussions for bringing home the bacon to your constituents at any cost.
Let's say that Biden wins, then Trump runs against him again in 2024. Somebody dies or retires right before the election, do you think the democrats would seriously wait and risk allowing the nomination to be done by Trump?
None of these people are in any way signaling their actual virtues. It's all just slogans. Also: the Democrats didn't grant this to the Republicans over Scalia. The Republicans were in power in the Senate at the time and used this power to their advantage.
Yeah, this is all terrible: this is the world you get when our politics seem to be regulated by twitter. If you want this to change, get rid of cable news talk shows, and get rid of twitter. Until then, this is what you're going to have.
If you're asking whether Democrats would have placed themselves in a similar position in 2016 if the roles were reversed, then the answer is no. I'd expect them to consider the nominee, and quite likely vote against - but they wouldn't stonewall until election.
You can't compare the senate majority leader with a random anonymous twitter account.
"We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court, We have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that." is...not.
Even still, your argument doesn't follow. Reacting to someone doing a thing you disapprove of isn't the same as instigating the thing. Your argument is that since Democrats disapprove of what Republicans did, and are considering taking action to undo and action they disapprove of, that they would have also done the act. That is very strange reasoning.
That's also a huge taboo, and for good reason. It prevents voters from making politically informed decisions because their representatives don't have actions on which to judge.
[Edit: I missed lame-duck Millard Filmore in 1852 the first time around also]
Prior to that you had John Tyler in 1844, who had two vacancies in the court open up in his election year. He made 9 proposals of 5 different people, one (John C. Spencer) was rejected and then later re-proposed and withdrawn, one (Reuben Walworth) was proposed 3 times, withdrawn once and postponed or lapsed twice. One was confirmed. Another was proposed twice. So this whole thing was a complete circus, but even still congress did their duty and confirmed one of Tyler's picks.
Prior to that there was John Quincey Adams who, also as a lame-duck, proposed a nominee who was tabled. In 1828.
So the precedent, insofar as there is one, is that when an election has already happened, the other party can table it. Except that more often than not, that doesn't happen. In fact, it's really only happened twice, in 1828, and 1852, and then not in 1880 despite similar circumstances. And then 2016.
And again those cases were different: Adams had already lost the election, when he made the nomination. Fillmore is maybe the closest, even though it happened later in the year the election hadn't happened yet, but Fillmore also failed to be re-nominated, so in a sense he'd lost the election in the primary.
[To be extra clear, in most of the cases where a nomination expired, the same president had a nominee confirmed later (Eisenhower, Harding, Cleveland), so it wasn't a flat out refusal to entertain candidates.
It might be more constructive to speak with precision about a claim of such import.
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17352230/al-franken-accusation...
I don’t think what we know he did deserved the punishment, especially the picture where he was pretend groping. Nobody would have batted an eye at it at the time.
The move is to have everything set and ready to go during the lame duck and push hard then if you lose or wait until Jan if you win. Removes the election math from the process.
Also, if it isn't consistent, that's because we only see a portion of what gets posted here, often rather randomly. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's apocalypse for the democrats.
The looming court seat was a very effective driver of votes for Trump in the previous election, at least that's the conventional wisdom. So have a go at seeing if that will work again. You can also spin it as being respectful, serious, and considered by waiting.
Even if you end up losing the Presidency, and even the Senate, you're still in power for enough time afterward to make an appointment.
The only things I could think of working against that would be: the idea that you just make the appointment immediately and tout it as another success to your base, or perhaps a fear that since it's Ginsburg's seat that's vacant, having it open is actually a more mobilizing force for Democrats. There's also, I suppose, the possibility that you make the move right away on the theory that this upcoming election is likely to be contested and could reach the Supreme Court.
The risk of not winning either is too much. They'd rather get the "win" and campaign on the win.
But this is also exactly why this gambit doesn't really work - because the voters know that whatever happens at the polls, the end result is the same. They could hold voters hostage to the Supreme Court nomination back in 2016 because there was a split between the president and the Senate that blocked either side from getting what they really wanted until the next term.
I don't think it's possible to remove the election math, though. Whatever he does, it could influence voter turnout for both sides.
There's also the possibility that something about the election will be disputed and go to the Supreme Court (as happened with vote counting with Bush v. Gore in 2000). So Trump might decide he wants his appointee to already be serving before election day if he thinks that would be more in his favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
American politics right now is full-on us-versus-them, and who has the biggest numbers. McConnell is in Kentucky and ahead in the polls, and he’s smart enough not to full-on troll the left with a flat-out fascist.
The left will respond as if he did anyway, but they’ll have a lot less success in convincing conservatives it’s a bad move if the judge is not beyond what most conservatives will support. That line has shifted far to the right (or, to the far right) over the past 30 years.
I guess I’m saying that opinions on an “inoffensive conservative justice” is a bimodal distribution, and McConnell’s right hump is higher.
Among voters, but Trump would/did(?) throw the GOP under the bus to get elected.
I mean I can believe both of those sets of people exist, but hardly that they're numerous enough to dictate the election strategy.
I don’t think libertarians realize where we are in 2020. Lots of culture war stuff from the last few decades where libertarians sided with liberals (abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage) has now flipped and then battleground is keeping the government from forcing people to participate in those things: Catholics being forced to perform elective abortions, nuns being forced to pay for contraception, people being forced to participate in same-sex weddings as bakers (and presumably caterers, etc.)
Nearly all EU countries recognize such conscience rights. Eliminating them would put the U.S. squarely outside the mainstream on this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objection_to_abo... ("Conscientious objection is granted in 22 member states of the European Union plus the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland.").
I guess it’s the libertarian thing. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.
And, of course, since the doctor is also an active participant in killing the fetus, it’s not the “doctor imposing morals in the patient.”
Obviously not. To begin, no religion I’m aware of would preclude informing the patient in that circumstance. And few libertarians believe that individual freedom requires allowing deception of others, as in your hypothetical.
Apart from that, weighing individual liberty interests is always context-dependent. E.g. consider the various wrinkles when it comes to self defense. For a libertarian, forcing doctors to perform a procedure that involves killing something (whatever you think that thing is) in non-emergency circumstances just because that might leave too few people in an area willing to do that probably falls too far on the side of ignoring individual liberty. It’s the basic libertarian position: you may have a right to something, but you don’t have a right to make someone else give you that thing.
so the solution is to ban abortions, contraceptives, and same-sex marriage altogether?
Look at the political debates likely to come up over the next 10 years and tell me where libertarians are aligned with liberals. Apart from the things I mentioned above, cases that will come up may include the constitutionality of a wealth tax, changes to equal protection to allow discrimination in favor of particular groups, firearms confiscation, etc. (I’m not saying all of these will happen, I’m pointing out what the next legal battlegrounds will be.)
The difference is that—unlike racial justice, women's rights, and gay rights—in this case abortion was a mistake and so the step forward would be to reverse it. If you go back far enough, society has successfully reversed actions that were at the time considered forward progress.
Also, I think most of the "right libertarians" are already Trump votes out of sheer disgust and exasperation. Libertarians (of any stripe) are probably the least likely to get hot and bothered by Trump's antics.
Also what happens if the election is contested and needs to be decided by the Supreme Court? Can't have a Supreme Court without a justice till January 20th.
Strangely enough that same Supreme Court spent most of 2016 without a justice with no issue.
Also, in what world the Supreme Court deciding on the validity of an election with a deciding member having been appointed to it just before that same election by one of the participants does not consist of a massive conflict of interest?
> History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic.
The linked article actually goes on to describe every situation where there was an election year Supreme Court vacancy. Please read.
Then you're back in the 1800s. But we routinely look back to the 1800s to establish what is accepted practice in our government.
The number of qualifications needed in order to establish this "precedent" should tip you off that it's manufactured expressly to gain a political advantage.
Correct, no one is actually surprised that Mitch McConnell abandoned the flimsy justification for his power grab the instant it outlived its use to him.
Alternatively, McConnell could have called the vote and the Republican majority in the Senate could have just voted it down.
Pre-nuclear option (an actual example of a power grab) even a minority of Senators could stop a nominee from getting through. The Republicans had a majority.
It can't be assumed that there wouldn't be Republican defections on a Garland confirmation. This is exactly the reason the majority leader refused to allow a vote. Even now, a number of Republican Senators have already "defected" and declared they won't vote on a nominee before the 2021 inauguration.
Routinely?
This sounds a lot like "originalism", which is controversial at best.
So no, I won't cite something else.
The National Review article links to the source data, data from CRS and data from senate.gov. CRS is the Congressional Research Service.
Think of it as a trial. Liberal leaning media is the prosecutor and conservative media is the defendant. Depending on the topic, these roles are reversed.