5392

That’s my read as well, naive though it may be.

5393

Sure, I guess, but if a hearing for Garland — a centrist choice by a Democrat if there ever was one — was simply going to be a sham in which Mitch went through the motions but with no intention of ever allowing him to be confirmed — then I don’t really see how that would have been any better than his ‘fuck you’ act.

The actual norm has been presidential nominations to the Court are confirmed, unless there is something wrong with the President or something wrong with the nominee. Dems with the power to filibuster instead confirmed both of GWB’s nominees. Reps with the power to filibuster instead confirmed both of Clinton’s nominees. Dems confirmed both of GHWB’s nominations, even though one of them was Thomas. Dems rejected Bork as an extremist, but otherwise confirmed all three of Reagan’s nominations as well as his elevation of Rehnquist.

So Obama did what was the standard practice up until then: he appointed a moderate rather than an ideologue, with the expectation that norms would prevail and Garland would be confirmed, and Mitch blew up the norms with some absurd justification to mask the pure power play, and now he’s reversing himself again for a pure power play.

5394

Correct!

5395

Which leads to an activist court, and the Constitutional Remedy for that is court-packing. That’s how the founding fathers intended to deal with an overzealous judiciary.

5396

Also correct!

5397

.
5398

I do not understand how he can vote to convict and remove this President from office, but then be willing to support that same man’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court months later. That part is what’s bewildering to me.

5399

Well, like you said, it would have been hard to portray Garland as some kind of Bork-like extremist during the hearing. And I doubt he could have stopped some Republican senators from voting yes if he’d had a hearing. I agree that if he could have arranged just a sham hearing just to say no, that wouldn’t have been any better. But I’d like to think he couldn’t have arranged that back then. This was pre-Trump, so Republican Senators still had some shame.

5400

McConnell blew up the good faith that the Senate relies on by obstructing judicial nominees in 2013 (leading to the elimination of the filibuster for judicial nominees) and then vaporized the rubble of that good faith by ghosting the Garland nomination in 2016. Without that measure of equity, the Senate is as problematic as the electoral college in allowing control by a minority portion of the country.

5401

At the time, a number of his colleagues publicly cited this arrangement: that they were unanimous in opposing any confirmation so there wasn’t any point in having hearings.

5402

It was March and April of 2016 and Donald Trump had all but sewn up the Republican nomination. Smart senators in the GOP already had their fingers in the wind and knew which way things were blowing.

5403

The wind was blowing in the direction of “Fuck you, you get nothing”, I guess.

5404

On reflection Mitt’s position does seem a bit odd. He both believes the President is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and ought to be removed from office, AND that the President should be able to name another Supreme Court Justice.

I suppose he could say that he hasn’t committed to a blanket, blind confirmation of whoever Trump names —as some of his colleagues basically have — and that he’ll be judging the nominee, not Trump.

5405

Seems like Mitt is just a more galling and extreme version of voters who disapprove of Trump but hold their noses and vote for him anyway to get the Supreme Court they want.

One of the more painful things to acknowledge these past few days is how well that strategy has worked out for them.

5406

I dunno. Whether it is working for them really depends on what the counterfactual looks like. It’s possible they’ll lose badly this fall, at least in part because of McConnell and Trump shenanigans and their explicit or tacit support for them, and be out of power for some time. If you believe that was going to happen anyway, then stacking the deck in the judicial branch is a good strategy. If on the other hand that wasn’t destined to happen, then causing it to happen by being dicks was a poor strategy. Trump could easily have a positive approval rating by simply having embraced a sane response to Covid and an expansive and aggressive aid and stimulus effort; and Republicans in Congress could easily have forced him to do that. That they did not force him remains, well, odd.

5407

This.

5408

Agreed on all of this. It’s just more short term gain at the expense of the long term health/safety/success of their party/planet/democracy.

5409

Well, if you vote to impeach someone, and the vote fails, how do you treat the president after that? Do you simply act as if they are not president anymore for the remainder of their term? I’m not sure that’s practical.

For example, if a grossly criminal president survived an impeachment vote and then shepherded the greatest climate change reform in history, I’m not sure that Senator Me would stand in the way of that. I might say ‘well, he sucks and I wanted him out, but that is no reason to stop this policy thing I approve of.’

5410

I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.

Shall we experience being degraded together? Here is the justification McConnell offered shortly after Ginsburg died for violating his own rule:

In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.

This last sentence—which you will recognize as the heart of McConnell’s argument—is a lie. But before I supply the dull fact proving that it is a lie, I’d like us to pause and notice the extent to which whatever I am about to say will not factor into how you feel reading the above. Whatever I say, it will not provide you relief for me to demonstrate that this tortured reasoning McConnell supplied is horseshit. You are already meant to understand it as horseshit. That’s the insult. That’s where one part of what I guess we could call patriotic pain comes from.

5412

Ha, that’s perfect.