That’s silly, both from a legal and historical standpoint.
You can’t just redefine “consent” to mean something that is given when it is not given. Historically, it has never meant that. Legally, it would suddenly throw criminal and civil law into chaos.
“Hey buddy you owe me $100 for mowing you lawn.”
“I never agreed to that”
“Well, now you don’t have to agree. I just assumed based on your lack of response. Pay up or go to jail.”
That doesn’t seems to be a comparable argument because these two are parties with a pre-existing defined constitutional relationship. It’s the senate who has broken the arrangement by withdrawing from their responsibility. If they actively vote to reject every nominee, however capricious, that is within their power. Choosing to not participate is constitutional nullification, and there is no legal basis for that.
The existing relationship is that to join the SCOTUS, you need a presidential nomination and legislative consent. By existing (though certainly flexible) Senate rules, the latter comes after a vote.
The constitution does not say that the senate is required to actually vote on anything, and there is longstanding precedent for not voting at all. The constitution does not say the senate has a time limit to consider whether to give consent.
So I don’t see any legal change in this relationship. There is a political change, as the legislature asserts more of an active role and is less willing to act as a rubber-stamp for the president. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
Well, there are always potential political consequences. Legally, though, they are in the clear.[/quote]
They are only in the clear if we all let it drop. You can assert that this was a legal tactic all you want, but that has not at all been shown.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
I think it’s more of a minor difference, but anyway there is precedent for both scenarios, as discussed above.[/quote]
There is not precedent for a nominee being denied a vote by fiat by the Majority Leader; it is not a minor distinction.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
I find that very difficult to believe. If a majority of Senators truly wanted Garland to join the SCOTUS, then he would be on the SCOTUS.[/quote]
That’s laughable. There are many examples of policies that a majority of either house would support, but only a minority of the majority party would support, and which are therefore not supported by the chamber. The Hastert Rule was invented specifically to create these situations, and there is really no other explanation for this extraordinary move by McConnell. It’s possible that they could have whipped votes to get him rejected, but that they would have had to give something away and thought this was the less costly approach, but it’s clear that rejecting him outright was not a foregone conclusion or else he would have been put up for a vote. If they thought that straight-up voting against him because it was an election year was going to fly in every GOP Senator’s home state, they would have had the vote. They did not think that was going to fly.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
Well, that tells you that nothing happens.[/quote]
There’s a lot of things that aren’t mentioned in the Constitution for which there are penalties. It’s ludicrous to assert that the default goes however McConnell wants it to simply because the Constitution doesn’t spell one out and he was the first to bring the issue up. If the default has been for the Senate to confirm nominees rather than reject them, then it makes more sense to assume confirmation unless the Senate votes to reject a nominee in a timely manner.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
Until they have a Senate majority, it doesn’t really matter whether the Democrats want to play ball with future nominations. I mean, what do you think they can actually do?
Yes, and eventually they will be told to sit back down by the parliamentarian. [/quote]
And yet, their grievance will still be on record and unsatisfied. This is a better outcome than choosing to go along with injustice. There are many ways for the Dems to fight, and judging the fight on the basis of whether or not the GOP can enforce it’s desires on the current outcome is silly. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping quiet and everything to be gained by repeating, loudly and clearly, how unjust this all is.
[quote=“magnet, post:77, topic:128260”]
There’s no constitutional protection for Senators in the minority party. They get whatever the majority agrees to give them.[/quote]
There doesn’t have to be constitutional protection for them. There’s no constitutional protection for political parties either. The whole point of Congress is to have a bunch of people come to an agreement about an issue, not to have 2-3 people ram their opinion down everyone else’s throat. If the majority of the country agrees with the GOP, then they will and should get their way, but if it is closely divided, and especially if a majority does not support their position, they should be made to compromise and the only way that can even happen is if the Democrats are willing to stand up and say, “This is not right, the American people are not with you on this.”
You seem to think that the only issue that matters for what actions should be taken is what is legally permissible and legally enforceable. That is not a good standard, and it is not how the government operates - the whole point of democracy is that public opinion rules the roost, turn that against the majority party and it will compromise or collapse. That’s the fight the Dems are left, and so that’s where they need to fight - not capitulate and stay silent because they are outnumbered 52-48.
There is actually a legal concept of negative consent in securities law. But the terms of it are defined in the bond documentation.
And we will let it drop, unless you can think of a tactic to overturn it. So far you’ve suggested kicking up a fuss, which was unsuccessful when Reid curtailed the filibuster and when the Bork nomination was rejected. What makes you think it would work today?
If something is denied a vote in the Senate, it’s always because of the Majority Leader. That was true 200 years ago and it’s true today.
OK. But I’m not interested in a bizarro world where legislators vote their conscience. The reality is that they vote according to game theory, and that means things like logrolling and the Hastert Rule.
There is no question in my mind that if Garland had somehow come up to vote in the Senate, the GOP would have voted on a party line and he would have been rejected. Would you really expect GOP senators to break party line in order to appoint a likely pro-choice judge to the SCOTUS? Keep dreaming.
And since having a vote and not having a vote ultimately lead to the same outcome, the process by which we reach that inevitable outcome is just a minor issue. In my opinion.
Yes, because there are laws to cover those things. If the law doesn’t cover something and the Constitution doesn’t cover it, then there is no legal penalty.
So once the Senate votes to force itself to vote, there will be a penalty when Senators don’t vote. Not before that.
Not at all. When a party breaks tradition to gain power in the Senate, as Democrats and Republicans have both done, there is a political price to pay in the form of voter backlash. Which is good, because it offsets the first mover advantage that the tradition-breaker enjoys.
What’s silly is to suggest that we can somehow unring this bell. The GOP paid the political price for obstructing Garland, and now both parties will be free to start doing the same sort of judicial obstruction when they are in power. The Senate majority isn’t going to simply give this power away, because why would it?
I agree with all your points except this one. If the GOP senators had been guaranteed to vote as a block to reject Garland, then McConnel would have brought him up for a vote.
No, as officials elected state-wide rather than in “safe” districts, there were more than a couple GOP Senators from Blue states that would have probably voted to confirm Garland, which was why the Great Turtle couldn’t allow him to come up for a floor vote.
I think this is academic. Even if Garland could have passed a floor vote, could he have passed a cloture vote?
Possibly? I mean, the way it ran down, the only Senator to take ANY heat on the issue was McConnell, who was willing to take the heat. If Garland had come up for a vote and the GOP filibustered him (first time in history), then the GOP Senators would have had that to answer for as well.
Forward, the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason … wait, why are we doing this, again?
Unless I’m mistaken, nobody here is happy or content with what happened to Garland. However, I’m wondering what comeuppance for the GOP’s (in)action is hoped for. Ravenight (among MANY others elsewhere, I don’t mean to single out) seem to echo this sentiment, but I don’t understand the goal. If it’s that we stay pissed off, I don’t think that’s an issue. However, any other rationale just doesn’t make much sense to me. Is it to get rid of the fillibuster? I’m not entirely against that, but keep in mind that an attempt to invoke it will assuredly wind up with that result, and it won’t be “was this a stolen seat” but rather “was this a qualified candidate” that gets considered first.
What I would like is for every Democrat who speaks to him, to ask him to speak to parts of Garland’s record in a manner which will highlight the relative inexperience.
Even if this was how it would have played out (and you are speculating as much as I am – a majority vote to reject a Supreme Court nominee is very rare, and Garland’s profile was far from the kind that trigger it), there would have been more consequences as a result of each Senator having to commit themselves than there were when only 1 Senator – who wasn’t running for re-election – could be blamed.
I don’t remember asking for a legal penalty - I didn’t say anything about bringing criminal charges, that’s not the kind of penalty I’m after, so this whole angle is irrelevant to the discussion. The point about Constitutional support or non-support is about whether, if someone was granted standing to sue, the SCOTUS would reject McConnell’s assertion that he can straight-up refuse to consider a nominee to the SC. I think the answer is that they would, in fact, reject that power grab - there is no possible reading of the Constitution that say the majority leader gets to choose which president fills a Supreme Court vacancy. I think we all agree that this was an unjust act and that it should not be allowed, so the question is what’s the appropriate mechanism to enforce the just outcome, either in this case or in future ones. The Constitutional angle is one possibility, but only if the SCOTUS will grant someone standing to sue over it, otherwise the letter of the Constitution is less relevant than the public perception of it.
So what I’m arguing is that the Dems should keep this injustice in the public eye and they should not do anything to legitimize the action. They should not simply accept that they can’t “un-ring the bell” and therefore file this away as their own weapon in the future, because the point is not about this single weapon, it’s about all the other possible weapons McConnell can invent. The first mover advantage is a big one, and there’s no reason that the penalty for it should be considered paid with a single election, especially one where the focus was on the spray-tan-in-a-wig and EMAILS! The penalty is fully paid when there is either an actual political concession to set things right, or the people responsible for breaking the rules are removed from power. Anything short of that is simply giving up on justice and thus allowing the first mover advantage to your opponent. Since we’re playing the “do you really believe” game, do you really believe that the GOP would have let this drop before the stolen seat was even filled? They won’t even let Obamacare remain settled despite 60+ failures to repeal, multiple losses in the courts, and the fact that it’s been law for 7 years, in effect for 3 years, and therefore the whole health insurance industry has reshaped itself to fit the law. Only now, when they are finally able to do something about it are they accepting the reality that most of its provisions can’t really be improved on.
If you think about just the Supreme Court and the currently-accepted practices with filling seats, you can lay this out as a game: vacancy opens that could tip the balance of the court, what does each side do? The assumption is that the court will tilt to the liberal side, but that the nominee will have to be more centrist because Scalia was so conservative and because there’s not much time for a contentious hearing. To change this default, the GOP has to make the first move. Option 1 is do nothing, in which case the normal nomination procedure begins. Option 2 is to make bold statements about the kind of nominee they will accept, asserting that Scalia’s seat should go to a Scalia-like thinker and that they will not accept a too-liberal replacement (this tries to move the Overton window for acceptable nominees, but ultimately has only a small effect). Option 3 is to commit immediately to blocking any nominee, no matter who it is, because it’s an election year. This is unprecedented but doesn’t seem to have a specific mechanism to block it, and has the effect of taking even an compromise candidate off the table (though it risks an even worse candidate if they lose the election, and potential voter backlash because of the injustice of the move).
GOP takes Option 3, and now it’s Obama’s move. Option 1, he could proceed as normal to nominate whoever he wanted, hoping to call their bluff. Option 2, he could put up a compromise candidate to highlight the injustice - that is, a candidate that would definitely win an up-or-down vote, and hope they are either bluffing or they suffer a big penalty in the election. Option 3, he could give them a victory by nominating a pro-Life justice, but therefore try to diffuse the power-grab (and potentially get a justice who is progressive in other ways, though this will be massively unpopular with his base and possibly not something he personally would happy about). Option 4, he could do Option 2, but also demand a response from Congress by some reasonable deadline based on past nomination processes, and state that if a confirmation vote has not occurred by that deadline, he will take that as consent from the Senate, since justices are confirmed much more often than rejected and he doesn’t want this process to play out during the final months of the campaign.
Obama takes Option 2, and the GOP choose to stick to its advertised strategy, even going so far as to publish a list of names they intend to select a nominee from. They hold the Senate and win the White House, the worst possible outcome (though the Dems do pick up some seats). Now it’s Obama’s move again - he can demand a vote before he leaves office or else he will order Garland to be sworn in, or he can just let it go and let Trump nominate someone. Obama again plays ball and just lets it go. So now we have another set of moves: Trump can nominate someone extremely conservative or somewhat moderate from the list they publish, or he can go off-list for someone conservative, moderate, or progressive, with more or less experience, younger or older. He goes for very young, but with strong experience, from the moderate end of the published list (this is a mild compromise on ideology, but still a big win for conservatives with a potentially long term on the court). His choice frames the issue as whether or not this well-qualified, not too crazily extreme candidate should be seated, giving a little bit of cover if they have to play hardball, but it still comes from a list approved by the most conservative elements of the party, so can still be characterized as extreme in the grand scheme (note the power of the framing device created by the list - “hey, I chose the most-moderate, well-qualified person I could!”).
So now we come to the Dems’ move, and they’ve got a mess. Prior to a nominee being selected, they can choose to either commit to blocking any nominee until Garland gets a legit vote or some other compromise is reached, or they can choose to wait and see who is nominated. They wait. Now, option 1 is they can play ball as normal, bring up all the ideological problems with the nominee that make him unacceptable to their individual constituents, and then vote as they feel they must on an individual basis (which probably means a confirmation with at least 55 votes, if not 60+). Option 2, they can commit to a filibuster and say that if the nominee can’t get 60 votes he shouldn’t be seated anyway, using the stolen seat and any potential backlash over the nuclear option as leverage to enforce that threshold (the main outcomes of this are either the nominee commits to a bunch of positions that make him acceptable to 8 Dems, the GOP goes nuclear to get the confirmation, or the nominee is withdrawn and there’s a new round). Option 3, they can commit to filibuster not just this nominee, but any nominee that doesn’t fit specific criteria for compromise, and whip votes hard against cloture to prevent 8 dems from pealing off. This will likely result in the nuclear option and Gorsuch being seated but will leave the frame intact that Garland’s seat was stolen to put Gorsuch in there. Option 1 is only the best option if there are no democratic senators who believe they would benefit politically by filibustering (if there are - and Merkley at least seems to be one), then this option comes with a cost (forcing those Senators to do something worse for themselves), and no benefits. Option 2 is best if someone does want to filibuster, since it allows each senator to do the thing they find politically expedient, and potentially gets either those senators or the party itself some form of horse-trade. If the end result is that the GOP doesn’t want to give up enough to sway 8 Dems and they just go with the nuclear option instead, that’s also a price the GOP ends up paying, and Dems can campaign on both the injustice of the stolen seat and the clearly autocratic way the GOP enforced their theft - something that should play poorly with an autocratic Trump in the White House. If they choose to withdraw Gorsuch, then the Dems can say that any new candidate must be to his left, since Gorsuch was clearly too extreme to replace Garland. If they find some concessions to get 8 Dems to vote in Gorsuch, then a) they get Gorsuch with essentially bipartisan approval and it’s no longer possible for the Dems to frame this as an autocratic stacking of the court - the issue is dead, Gorsuch is legit, and Trump will have a free hand with any future picks, and b) the Dems have shown that they will play the optimal move for the current game, rather than retaliate for poor behavior, which means the GOP will again feel free to act in bad faith any time it thinks the move will leave the Dems with an optimal response the GOP can live with.
This is a basic problem of game theory optimization - there are no credible threats when the payoffs are public knowledge - you have to somehow commit to a sub-optimal strategy when your threat is not heeded or your bluff will always be called. If you want to chase the big blind with a raise pre-flop, it helps if you’ve established that they will not get a free card on the flop or the turn, even though taking away your own ability to check will lead to poor outcomes when the blind calls and hits something on the flop. Right now, the Dems are the player who always checks the flop on a draw and the GOP has been using that to draw to every inside straight and bottom pair they get. The Dems need to start betting the flop, not just with this current hand, but with a whole series of them, or we will lose all ability to control the game. Some of those bets will cost something on an individual basis, but if they aren’t willing to even make them, they have opened up a major leak that the GOP is clearly willing to exploit without a single ruth.
Sure, it’s possible if there were a vote then individual Senators would have paid a political price for not supporting Garland. But I think that by not holding a vote, the GOP in general paid a political price. And I don’t think it all necessarily falls on McConnell’s head, since there were plenty of Senators who publicly supported his decision.
In short, a political price was paid regardless. Maybe in the end it was worth it, maybe not. It’s hard for me to get too worked up from this angle.
I disagree. The Senate has straight-up refused to consider a nominee to the SCOTUS in the past. More than once. That ship has sailed.
And again, if the Senate can refuse to do something then obviously the majority leader can refuse to do it.
Actually, I don’t agree. Traditionally, the president has been given broad deference in nominating people to the SCOTUS but I think the constitution would also support an arrangement where the Senate does most of the actual decision-making, through its power of refusal. I don’t think that arrangement would be undemocratic or even unjust (apart from the general injustice that a change in rules always favors the first mover).
I mean, they certainly could. But I just don’t think it’s worth it. People are going to forget about it regardless of what Senate Democrats want. Just like we all kind of forgot about Reid’s partial abolition of the filibuster, even though many people on the right were just as incensed then as you are now.
So in three years, when people have forgotten despite your best efforts, Democrats have hypothetically recaptured the Senate, and Trump has a new SCOTUS opening… well, I guess there would be a calculation to perform, and I suspect the result would be the same as in 2016.
No, and no. There’s a big difference between not considering someone nominated with less than a month to go in a session, and not considering someone nominated with nearly a year left. There was only one case in history remotely comparable to this one, Bradford, who was nominated with 15 days to go before Congress went home to campaign in 1852. Failing to act on his nomination in that window was wrong, but nominations can take time and that was not a lot of time. If he had been re-nominated after the election, he might have been confirmed, too (this happened several times in later years), but Fillmore went with someone else instead during his lame duck period. That this happened once and there was no further action over it doesn’t mean it is a confirmed power of the Senate, and is far from being a precedent that would preclude a challenge to it, especially considering that it didn’t happen again for almost 165 years.
The Senate has the power to vote to postpone a vote, if that’s what they want to do - they’ve done that on many occasions in the past (it was much more common than outright non-action). That would at least have had the support of a clear majority of the Senate. This is not that, this is the majority leader acting alone to prevent a nomination vote. The Constitution doesn’t not give the majority leader the power to decide who gets to nominate a justice - it doesn’t even give the full Senate that power, though it doesn’t prevent it from declaring an intention not to consider a particular nominee. Again, this is different, because it was not a vote to not consider a single person, it was a complete stonewalling of a Constitutional power of the Presidency by the majority leader. That’s what makes it unjust. The Senate had the right to reject the nominee, and to reject any other specific nominee it was sent, but to use its right to advise and consent as a way to block all possible nominees, sight unseen, is unjust and unprecedented.
The Senate was not doing any decision making about nominees here. They were deciding who should choose, not who should be confirmed, and the Constitution clearly does not give them the power to decide who gets to nominate a justice.
If people have forgotten in 3 years but Dems have won back the Senate, then the issue has been used to proper effect. The Dems would block any non-compromise nominee, but my hope would be that they have committed themselves sufficiently to rejection the McConnell’s power grab that they block conservative nominees by simply voting them down, not by refusing to consider them. Your strategy would of course have them go ahead and refuse to hold hearings (and really, with that strategy they would simply refuse any nominee made in 2019 or later, because the campaign will already have started), but to me that’s a problem - I have no problem with the Senate holding the President to a higher standard than it has in the past (when the president’s party doesn’t have control), but it’s absurd for them to take away a power of the Presidency and assert full control over the nomination process (which is what they are doing if they refuse to consider anyone for a major portion of the president’s term).
I get that you don’t seem to care that they stole a seat and you think that voters also don’t care. There are lots of them that do care, though - it isn’t me alone. The people who care are valuable allies whose support can be meaningful, the people who don’t care don’t care either way, so what’s the cost of fighting? The cost of not fighting is a loss of enthusiasm from people who are looking for leaders willing to fight, and a further loss the ability to make threats, which means less bargaining power in all future negotiations.
I’m sorry, but that’s obnoxious. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of us (here) are pissed about that, but we also don’t think that there’s much to be done.
I also think you believe the Democrats have a lot more power in this affair than perhaps the rest of us do. To me, using a filibuster that will get almost instantly defanged is the legislative equivalence of pissing in the wind, and taking that action isn’t going to change anything for me and I’m not sure how it would for anyone else.
If a voter isn’t committed enough to care about and remember Garland getting ignored last year, I’m not sure how trying to make a stink this year would make any difference. I’d rather keep that (rather weak) bullet in my gun for blatantly unqualified/horrible candidates and make a stink about current horribleness and move on.
We were discussing how the SCOTUS would respond to an allegation that McConnell acted illegally.
Since there is no written time limit on confirmation, I doubt they would find that it makes a difference whether someone spends a year or a month in limbo without confirmation. I mean, that would require the SCOTUS to invent a formal time limit for confirmation, out of thin air. I just don’t think that would happen.
What do you mean by “acting alone”? There are plenty of bills that never get a vote in the Senate. Is the leader “acting alone” in each case?
Majority leaders can be replaced pretty much at any time. If McConnell’s weren’t acting as agent of the majority, they could have gotten rid of him.
[quote] The Senate had the right to reject the nominee, and to reject any other specific nominee it was sent, but to use its right to advise and consent as a way to block all possible nominees, sight unseen, is unjust and unprecedented.
[/quote]
If you can refuse to consider any nominees you’ve seen, then you obviously have the right to refuse to consider any nominees you haven’t seen.
Just for fun, imagine Obama had declared that henceforth he would veto every single law the Republican Congress ever passed, without exception. Nevermind whether that’s wise, would it be within his rights? Of course it is. So why can’t the Senate do the equivalent?
[quote]the Constitution clearly does not give them the power to decide who gets to nominate a justice
[/quote]
No, but it gives them the power to block anyone and from a practical standpoint, there is little difference.
I mean, the Senate could announce “We will not consent to anyone except Mr X”. It would be an unprecedented shift of power, but it’s certainly within their rights. And why would that be unjust? It’s not particularly anti-democratic.
I think there is a tendency to suggest that any unfavorable change in the balance of power is “unjust”, but I reject that idea. To take a simple example, Republicans argue that conferring statehood to DC is “unjust” because it would give an advantage to Democrats. But that’s the wrong approach.
Sure, from a political perspective Democrats should milk this for all it’s worth. But from a practical and legal perspective, I don’t think anything will change.
Of course, there’s always this …
I just saw that episode last week. The world of today and the works that exists in the Bartlett Presidency are so ridiculously different that it’s impossible to compare. Another episode in season 5 follows CJ around documentary-style. They actually worry about the dignity of the White House and the relationship the press secretary has with the media. Can you imagine??
At most it would require that they require Congress to put a bounds on or a recourse for excessively long non-consideration. It would mean that they lay out a thought process which says that actions intended to reject a candidate are fine, but not actions intended to reject a president’s right to nominate. There’s a clear delineation in this case, with many statements of intent to go on, so they could even dodge the question of what happens if various procedural delays drag the process out until a president leaves office, and simply rule that denying a president the right to nominate is not ok, no matter what day of his term it is. They have not ruled on this issue, and the Constitution seems pretty clear-cut about this. Saying “well, theoretically, we could just reject every nominee you put up individually, so instead we will refuse to even consider any of them” is not the same actually going ahead and rejecting each individual nominee, and even if they had done the latter, you could argue that doing so as part of a coherent strategy to deny Obama a pick was unconstitutional.
They are voted on at the start of each Congress, so once every 2 years. I’m not sure one has ever been removed from office in the middle of that term, but even so, representing the majority of the majority party is not the same as representing the will of the Senate as a whole, and it is the Senate as a whole that has vested powers. I’m not arguing that the GOP was upset with him, I’m arguing that he hijacked the Senate’s constitutional duty and used it to remove a constitutional power of the Presidency.
That isn’t obvious at all. There’s a clear, functional difference between, “we are not going to vote on this nominee” and “we are not going to vote on any nominee by this President”.
The Congress has a remedy to a committed veto of that sort, so I’d assume the SCOTUS would say that the Congress should override the vetoes. In the SCOTUS case, it’s the opposite: the Senate has other ways to accomplish the task of rejecting a nominee it doesn’t find acceptable or to limit the size of the Court, so it should use those instead of this unchallenged rule-by-fiat method. It’s also a much higher price for a President to pay to refuse all laws that might be passed during his term than for the Senate to leave SC seat vacant, so it isn’t a great analogy. The real question is what would happen if a Democratic Senate refused to allow Trump to appoint any judges, period? Would the only recourse be for the people to get upset and vote them out? Why is this the one area of law where there is no remedy? I mean, if the President does crazy stuff, he can be impeached, or his vetoes overridden, or his EO’s made illegal by new laws, etc. If the SCOTUS issues rulings that aren’t popular, the Constitution can be amended (and justices can be removed from office if they lack Good Behavior). But if the Senate refuses to do one of its constitutional duties, then there’s no recourse for the other two branches?
No, they couldn’t - it’s not even clear they could constitutionally commit to only nominating justices from an approved list they created. The Constitution isn’t some D&D manual you can rules-lawyer by adding your own interpretation of the words. Your interpretation is no more reasonable than reading the second amendment as only applying to the right of militia members to bear arms, or of reading as an absolute bar to any and all restrictions on the private ownership of weapons. There is context and meaning for every ruling, and the text itself is only a narrow piece of that. Whether or not you think the Senate should be the ones to nominate justices, the Constitution clearly intends that to be the President, so it would take an amendment for your interpretation to be valid. I agree that “just” and “unjust” can be in the eye of the beholder, but in this case I only meant that the Senate Majority Leader deleting presidential powers by fiat is not something we should tolerate. Clearly McConnell either thinks it is just or doesn’t care.
So we basically agree, except that I think there’s a lot to gain in future negotiations by showing you are willing to fight when treated poorly, instead of just immediately forgetting all past wrongs.
Is it, or was it simply a direct restatement of what he was saying?
No, it was not at all a restatement of what he was saying. He’s been trying to explain to you how things work (or don’t, in this case). It was a just action. It just happened to be awful. The GOP senate played within the rules, and they continue to do so. Calling the seat “stolen” isn’t accurate, even if it’s a sentiment I agree with. It was by all intents and purposes a “legal move” within the game. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about the outcome.
I never said he didn’t care whether it was Gorsuch or Garland in the seat, I said he didn’t care that it was stolen. He also said exactly that, that he didn’t care about the process that lead to the outcome.
No, they didn’t, and if people keep saying they did, then there is still a good reason to keep fighting against their overreach.