When they did the first “Ignoration” it should have been on the dems agenda to press harder on the other side than they were used to historically.
Very specifically this would have meant that when kavanaugh says, in his confirmation hearing that there was a conspiracy from “the clintons and outside left wing groups” for a “political hit” etc etc. he should have been asked to explain fully his world view. Everyone watching knew that it would be wrong to put someone who said that on the court. Yet we all just watched it happen.
Whitehouse did not do that. It was out of the wheelhouse of a senator of either party to do this, except for maybe mcconnell who is the source of antidemocracy in the senate. K thought he was toast and went on a suicidal rant. But Graham picked up the football and ran with it. And in a post truth post democracy reality this stuff actually flies.
I think that kavanaugh is tainted by that statment and will never be able to change that. It was up to dem senators to make that the issue when they could.
I do believe that the republicans are going to be regretting this.
Absolute bullshit-Obama’s nomination wasn’t rejected because of who the candidate was-the candidate was rejected because he was nominated by Obama. It is far to late in the game to put forth the tired argument that it was the candidate that was rejected in this case.
Honestly, the only thing that can be done would be a constitutional amendment to force the Senate to act upon a nomination that has been made either within a given time limit. A president has no genuine power over the amendment process, but if he’s running against what seems to enough people to be a do-nothing/too-partisan Congress, he might be able to use his bully pulpit to get the ball rolling.
I think you are probably right, but I certainly wouldn’t say I was “confident” about it. Had Obama nominated someone who is perceived to be as conservative a Gorsuch, it would have been a ridiculous gamble for the Republicans to hope Clinton would lose the presidency. But I thought it was a pretty crazy gamble on Garland, too. However, the hypothetical is ridiculous since there would be no point in Obama nominating someone a Republican president would nominate. From Obama’s perspective, it’s better to have an 8-justice SCOTUS than to have Gorsuch make it 9.
You really believe that if Obama had nominate a Scalia clone, McConnell would have stuck to his guns and not confirmed him, just to keep Obama from getting a “win”? I don’t, and I don’t see how any knowledgeable person could sincerely believe that.
Yes, because attacking Obama was Mitch McConnell’s avowed political goal. Mitch McConnell is a spiteful, corrupt caricature of a politician who isn’t even very popular in his home state. As obnoxiously partisan and attention whoring Democrats like Chuck Schumer are, McConnell consistently takes the cake in how fast he’ll lower the bar on ethical compromise. The exercise in denying Merrick Garland even a Judiciary Committee hearing–not even a forum to question Garland even though there was a clear Senate majority to shut him out if we was truly unsuitable to Republican voters–was one of the most openly politically abnormal acts of the decade, if not of the last forty years, even surpassing the Iran-Contra affair and subsequent pardoning of all responsible parties.
There is no denying that it is standard form to give a Supreme Court nominee a hearing, even one as unpopular as Robert Bork, and that McConnell and Grassley conspired to defy that norm for purely partisan reasons unrelated to anything about Garland’s competence, experience, or basic fitness to serve on the court. You can disagree with that statement but then you’re going to have to back it up with a more substantive argument beyond, “Huh-uh!” or “If only Obama had nominated ____…”
“Our top political priority over the next 2 years should be to deny Obama a second term.”
That’s a quote from 2010 about making sure Obama was a 1-term president. Scalia died 6 years later, toward the end of Obama’s 2nd term, so that’s not much of an argument about what the Republicans would do then.
Looking at it from a purely political standpoint, it would be nuts for the Republicans to oppose seating Gorsuch. As I said earlier, Obama would be better off with an 8-justice court and no Gorsuch, which is why it would never happen. But if by some insanely crazy circumstance, Obama did nominate Gorsuch, the Republicans would be much better off with a 9-justice court including Gorsuch than they would be with an 8-justice court and no Gorsuch.
Yeah, the idea of such a nomination is crazy. But insisting that the Republicans wouldn’t allow him to be seated is just about as crazy.
I’m not nearly so sure about this. The toxicity to the Republican base was about who Obama was far more than judicial philosophy. I think it’s very possible that anyone willing to accept Obama’s nomination would immediately be unacceptable to that base by virtue of the fact that they were “touched” (in a political sense) by Obama.
If Obama were going to nominate someone who is as much a lefty as the Kav is a tighty righty, who might it have been?
But he wouldn’t and that’s kinda his point. Obama is a born-again centrist, he totally believes that stuff about compromise and reason. I admire him for it, but in the cold light of realpolitik, no good deed goes unpunished. He made the effort, went the extra mile, and got nothing for it but an insult from McConnell.
Worse, the enmity is artificial, its made up. If Obama is a radical lefty, Hubert Humphrey was a Trotskyist! And its not even all McConnell’s fault, its not his Republican Party, its Trump’s. He’s got them all by the…well, he’s got them. Got 'em good and hard!
No, the quote does not directly address the nomination of Merrick Garland. It does, however, illustrate the mentality of Mitch McConnell and the GOP overall in being unwaveringly obstructionist if they do not get absolutely everything they want. McConnell’s definition of the term “compromise” is “You give me everything I wamt, plus feed me some pork to line my pockets with, and I’ll consider saying yes.” Mitch McConnell is a corrupt, lying, obfuscating, double-crossing shitbag of a politician to a degree unique even among Republicans and career politicians as a whole. And he was ardently opposed to anything Obama, even a health care act that was in large measure drawn from the Republican playbook of the mid-‘Ninties.
And today, while Gorsuch is a conservative, he isn’t the justice who is going to lead the charge to overlook executive misconduct or buoy the notion that a sitting President cannot be investigated, which was the motivation behind the Kavanaugh nomination.
McConnell was party to this nastiness long before the notion of seriously running for president popped into Trump’s vacuous chamber of a mind and started bouncing around like a fart in an echo chamber. Mitch McConnell is every bit responsible, and in his own way just as much of a shit, as Trump. He is one of the people who ruined my Republican party and I look forward to the day he packs away his multiple chin folds and climbs back into whatever mouldy crack he emerged from.
I don’t think the president has any recourse. McConnell’s tactics with Garland - refusing to consider; and with Gorsuch - eliminating the filibuster; and with Kavanaugh - promising to ram it through even in the face of the sexual allegations…all of that shows how much McConnell is willing to do to get something he wants very badly.
And there’s nothing a president can do on any of that.
As a side, but related point, Democrats need to wake up. Republicans are playing hardball in many ways, on many issues, and the Dems had better start playing just as hard, or they’ll continue to get run over. There’s a reason that a political party with a minority of the votes is in control of all levers of government, and it’s not because Republicans are upholding principles or playing nice guy.
Richard Lugar, Judd Gregg, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe. All 5 Rs, all voted to confirm Kagan. And I believe 9 Republican Senators voted for Sotomayor. I think the risk to a Republican Senator NOT voting for Gorsuch would have been greater than the risk would have been to vote against.
Feel free to have the last word. I can’t believe we’re discussing such a crazy hypothetical anyway.
But he cannot ***command ***that the matter be brought to a vote. That has to be a decision of the collective. He convenes them, moves that discharging the committee from consideration of the appointment be placed in the Executive Calendar, and the answer from the floor majority is “Nay”. The appointment stays trapped under Grassley’s buttocks, neither approved nor rejected.
It’s really beside the point, which is that Garland was denied even a hearing in contradiction to over a century of precedent for purely arbitrary reasons. HurricaneDitka wants to argue the “Yeah, but…” that a Gorsuch nomination would have been heard and approved, but that isn’t the point; the President gets to decide who he wishes to nominate, and the Senate is supposed to “advise and consent” by giving a fair hearing, not blocking any consideration by procedural malfeasance.