During the Gorsuch nomination process, there were people who insisted that no nominee not named “Merrick Garland” should be considered for the position. IIRC, there were even some people still insisting on that when it was time to nominate Kennedy’s replacement.
I don’t doubt that if another Supreme Court vacancy opens up in the future while there is a Republican president and a Democratic Senate, that the Republican nominee would get stonewalled Garland-style. But otherwise, it doesn’t look like anyone will seriously demand Garland for another Supreme Court nomination any time soon - especially since the next two likely SCOTUS retirements will be liberal judges (Ginsburg and Breyer.)
Replacing someone like Ginsburg or Breyer with Garland would represent a (small) shift of the Court to the right. It wouldn’t make anyone happy - Democrats wouldn’t go along with it, and Republicans wouldn’t like it either (waters down their opportunity to shift the Court rightward big time. They’d want to replace a Ginsburg with a Pryor or Barrett.)
I don’t think the* issue* can be put to bed. Although, I think you may be right that Garland won’t get another shot. McConnell will have to suffer a little more before I am willing to forget what he did. At the end of the day, even if McConnell wasn’t such a deplorable person and allowed a vote, Garland probably wouldn’t have been confirmed. It would have been nice to see the Senators dance around their “no” votes though.
Why just 2? Packing the Court is the equivalent of nuclear warfare; go big or go home. It wouldn’t make sense to lob just two nukes when your adversary can lob back 200.
Because people are more likely to support that which seems to be a proportionate response. Adding two could be argued to reestablish neutrality, while more would clearly be a power grab.
Not that it has any chance of happening. What might have a chance is passing a full-on law requiring a supermajority, or a law saying that all nominations must be considered in a certain amount of time. Garland is obviously still an important part of that, even if he doesn’t get nominated (as we’d likely need to nominate someone to offset the biases of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.)
I’m personally hoping for a lot of laws to codify that which was just tradition around the presidency, because we now have the proof that tradition is not enough. We need a lot of laws to fix this democracy that is currently being broken by partisans and a president who got elected without caring about the United States of America or even being competent enough to help the US to make himself look better.
It’s like any other wrongdoing: it goes away when either the wrongdoer apologizes and makes amends, or we do something to prevent it from happening again. It doesn’t go away simply because it happened in the past, as a certain blackface governor and edgy comedian have discovered.
And, yes, this time I do consider those to be not as bad as what the Republicans did with Garland. It’s why I don’t believe the crap that they’re not going to try and make abortion illegal. Otherwise why do all these underhanded things? It’s all justifiable to the god of pro-life.
I do doubt that. Not everything is “both sides”: Dems don’t have backbone and Reps don’t have shame.
If the vacancy opens at around the same time in Trump’s term as it did in Obama’s, I would expect Dems to put up some kind of stink, and Republicans would have to pick someone a little more centrist, but it would go through.
If it’s an 11th hour vacancy then I can imagine a longer fight and the outcome is less certain. Of course the ideal would be to sort out the rules once and for all.
In the olden days power passed back and forth peacefully between D’s and R’s. D and R Congressmen would debate, and then go to each others’ homes for weddings and such on the weekends.
Nowadays, the struggle often seems to be between the Forces of Man and the Forces of Mordor. Some of us think extreme measures should be taken to defeat Mordor, to defeat it so thoroughly it never raises its head again.
If the 2020 election is close it may be given to Mordor by a 5-4 Scotus vote. There may be little to be done about that, but if 2020 is won in a Scotus-proof landslide we’ll want to protect the country from continued Scotus evil.
That doesn’t answer the question; indeed it only reinforces it. If you want to make SCOTUS “Mordor-proof,” why would you pack in only 2 extra seats instead of 20 or 200?
Details of that question seemed highly tangential. Upping Scotus from 9 to 13 might be a good compromise (depending on whether Ginsburg is still alive). We’d want to stab a permanent stake through Sauron’s heart, but not appear overly farcical about it.
Antonin Scalia died on February 13th 2016. The corresponding date in Trump’s first term is coming up next week. Should another justice die before Trump’s term ends, I would look forward to the Republican-controlled Senate sticking to their principles and delaying confirmation of a successor until after the next president is sworn in.
Why would they have to pick someone more centrist? I expect they’d pick another Federalist Society clone who went straight from mediocrity to the bench. Last year’s election results mean they can even afford to give hall passes to up to three senators.
It’s pointless to search for a “rule” here beyond “because we can.”
IMHO Garland is aging out of the running. I believe that one of the factors Obama used in choosing him, in order to soften the opposition and get buy-in from the GOP (which didn’t work), was Garland’s age at the time. The thinking being that at 63 he wouldn’t be on the court THAT long. Obama being Obama, his tendency to negotiate from a position of weakness bit everyone in the fundament. The GOP knows to always ALWAYS go for younger justices, so they will sit for a LONG time. So, no, Garland’s ship has sailed.
Regarding the “issue” of how Garland was handled by McConnell. Oh, heck no, this will resonate for generations. Maybe someday (a boy can hope) a McConnell like lizard will emerge in the Senate leadership on the Dem side who can reverse the polarity.
I think the Garland nomination was actually the right move – it he had nominated some very young, very progressive judge, then I’m not sure if this would be as useful a rallying cry as it’s become for liberal and progressive voters. He nominated someone that even Orrin Hatch said he ought to nominate – and that wasn’t enough. He showed that the GOP stance was both immoral and against the spirit of the Constitution (if not against the letter of the law).
It needed to be a rallying cry in 2016. And it wasn’t.
I don’t know if there’s a well-known liberal judge out there, but if there is, he should have nominated that person. Or maybe if he’d nominated Senator Professor Warren to the Court, that would have made the seat a rallying cry for progressives.
But nobody on the left really cared about getting Garland on the Court.
I’m unconvinced. If he had nominated a 45 year old very liberal judge, McConnell’s argument would have been “if you had nominated someone reasonable, like Garland, we’d be happy to consider him as a replacement for Scalia”. It would still have been bullshit, but I think it would have been a more legitimate-seeming bullshit, leaving a bunch of us thinking “maybe he should have nominated Garland”.
On the other hand, maybe Obama should have nominated such a young liberal, and then a month later “capitulated” and nominated Garland. But that probably would have brought to the same ultimate place anyway – a bullshit argument for not even considering Garland.
We need a Constitutional amendment to fix the mess long-term. Only once that’s assured should we try to address the short-term problem, because otherwise any short-term solution will devolve into farce. If we pack the court to fix the problem, then the next time the Republicans are in power, they’ll just pack it even further the other way, and next thing you know, the Supreme Court is bigger than the House of Representin’.
Still, one wonders when the cutoff date is that would allow a replacement to be appointed by the sitting president, and whether Republicans in the Senate would adhere to their established principle on the matter.
Details of that question seemed highly tangential. Upping Scotus from 9 to 13 might be a good compromise (depending on whether Ginsburg is still alive). We’d want to stab a permanent stake through Sauron’s heart, but not appear overly farcical about it.