I’ve always thought that the central tenet of a healthy conservatism would be the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. The problem becomes, so few people are willing to admit it when some part of our society is broken, so they refuse to fix it.
And following that rule, you can see that very little of what the GOP has been doing is in any way “conservative”, in that they’re going out of their way to break things, and then acting like they’ve fixed things. A perfect example is the Supreme Court. It mostly worked when the rule was, “The President makes a nomination, and then the Senate votes on that nomination”. But then the GOP went and decided to fuck with that working formula by simply refusing to allow Obama’s nomination to reach the voting stage.
Now, just a few years later, we have a significant portion of the population who have begun to think that the Supreme court is no longer a valid, functioning institution.
So much of being an ethical conservative boils down to, “Okay, do that, but not in a sarcastic or snarky way”.
Fiscal responsibility is asking the question, “How are we going to pay for that?”, but as an honest inquiry. If you think “that” is a valid use of funds, where do those funds come from? Raise taxes, cut something else, take on debt, or some combination of the three. And be prepared to defend that funding scheme. If you’re cutting “this” to pay for “that”, be prepared to explain why “this” is less deserving of funding. If you’re going to raise taxes, be prepared to explain why that new tax would impose less burden than the value of doing “that”. If you’re taking on debt, explain why doing “that” today is worth the cost of debt being paid tomorrow.
The GOP wakes up every morning and looks itself in the mirror and says “I’m alright! It’s everyone else who has a problem!” It’s like an addict that cannot admit what it’s doing is not healthy, so until members of the GOP start saying and doing things that are considered healthy for a political party (staying on-message with the platform, working for the greater good of the country even if it means compromise, accepting losses, seeking to expand membership thru evolution of ideas, etc.), a healthy GOP is not going to be possible. It may have already morphed into something else - something more permanent with no path back at this point.
Near as I can tell, you’re saying it would’ve been okay for them to reject the guy by voting ‘no’ on the nomination, but they fucked with that by rejecting the guy without even bothering to vote ‘no’.
And, for the life of me — so what? What changes if, in some alternate timeline, Senators tell Obama: hey, we’re not going to vote ‘yes’ if you nominate someone, so you don’t need to bother, and then Obama nominates a guy anyway, and a ‘no’ vote ensues with a shrug, and Senators say, well, maybe you’re a little slow on the uptake, but I trust you get it now, and then Obama maybe nominates another guy, at which point the Senators roll their eyes and vote ‘no’ again, and say what, are you stupid or something? We said you didn’t need to bother, and — holy crap, are you now readying another pick? What do we have to do to get you to realize what’s going on, here? How about if we don’t even bother to vote? Will that get through to you?
If he’s not going to get a ‘yes’, who cares whether he gets a ‘no’?
Because we actually get to see who they are voting “No” to. By about the 6th iteration, even the stupid people will begin to see they’re not voting on any actual merits of the candidates, they’re just engaging in obstructionism.
As it is, simply refusing to allow a vote gives every one of them other than Moscow Mitch cover when they have to face the public. “Hey, that had nothing to do with me, I would have voted if there had been a vote, go complain to Mitch…”
But wasn’t that obvious even in the one, uh, iteration that we got? Wasn’t it obvious that, by not bothering to vote, they were just as much engaging in obstructionism, and that they didn’t take cover by pointing a finger at Mitch? I don’t see that we needed six iterations; if anyone was too dumb to get it in one, which I have no reason to believe, then I figure they’d be too dumb to get in six…
Obvious to you or I, perhaps, clearly not obvious to large numbers of GOP voters. That’s why they kept coming up with excuses for why they didn’t have to hold a vote, excuses that they then ignored in 2020 when Trump was president.
I hold out hope that there’s some subset of people dumb enough to fall for the short con, who may be smart enough to see the long con, if we force enough evidence in front of them. US elections these days flip on the basis of a few thousand votes here and there. It doesn’t take much to change things.
In addition to flipping the slightly less stupid GOP voters, blatant obstructionism might also motivate non-voters to get off their asses. There’s a lot of people who seem content to just let Washington run itself without their input. But if they start to see Washington not running at all, maybe they’ll be motivated to get involved.
Well, they didn’t have to hold a vote in 2020; I’d say they didn’t have to hold one in 2016, and they didn’t have to hold one in 2020, and they voted ‘yes’ when they decided to vote ‘yes’, and didn’t when they didn’t, because, y’know, legislators can so decide.
Wasn’t Mitch’s concern based on the fact that Garland likely had enough votes? In the Senate, there are far fewer bomb throwers, and enough old school guys that it was likely Garland would get to 51…? Maybe I’m misremembering, but I am certain there was a fruitless full court press to force the majority’s hand—i.e., lots of desperation to get a vote to the floor.
Also the few moderate GOPers who might have voted “No” would be risking their seats (in both senses of the word) come Election Day. So it was a total no-win for them.
I’m personally not in favor of allowing cowards to run the government. Take a stand, and defend that stand.
Look at Jan 6th for what happens when we allow cowards to be in positions of power. Mitt Romney’s recent revelations about how many GOP members knew they were in the wrong, but caved due to cowardice, are damning.
There’s an old adage, “There are reasons, but no excuses.”
I know why they didn’t want to put it to a vote. They didn’t want Obama to put someone on the Supreme Court, but they were to cowardly to explain that to their voters. Sure, that’s the reason, but I’m in favor of making them own that reason.
And it was especially hard for them because Obama had nominated a very conservative Democrat whom they had already overwhelmingly approved for a judgeship.
I imagine that they wanted the comfort of telling their voters “Well, I have voted for a nominee but not that crazy left-wing communist that Obama nominated…” and he wouldn’t give them that excuse.
The problem is the fact that a pack of obstructionist asses that would rather spite Obama each and every time than govern ended up in office in the first place.
This is not the behavior of a rational adult, and certainly not the behavior of someone who should be in a position of authority like “Senator”. This is the behavior of a young and particularly dimwitted child.
The issue was using the excuse of a future election in refusing to hold a confirmation hearing and then throwing that same excuse out the window when an opening came up at the end of Trump’s first term.
If someone wants to argue that the Senate now absolutely controls the SC appointment process, go ahead and knock yourself out. But don’t plead confusion over why Democrats were furious at how those two picks went down.
This seems too obvious to mention, let alone go on and on about; but, well, what the hell.
Of course you vote to confirm a Supreme Court pick that you’re in favor of. If you’re a Senator, that’s, like, what you’re there to do. It’s pretty much the whole point. And, starting from there, you could, in turn, of course refuse to confirm a Supreme Court pick you’re not really in favor of; that’s no different than, I dunno, voting to make X a death-penalty offense (because you figure it should be) after not voting to make Y or Z a death-penalty offense (because, well, you didn’t). It’s like voting to go to war against A (because you’re okay with that) after not voting to go to war against B or C (because, again, you weren’t). Or whatever.
That’s what Senators do, right? They vote to legalize this, if they’re in favor of doing so — even if they didn’t vote to legalize that, because they, uh, weren’t? Or to criminalize something, if they’re in favor of doing so — even if they didn’t vote to criminalize something else? And so on and so on, forever and ever, amen?
I don’t know that I ever figured that they needed an excuse to vote in favor of outcomes they were in favor of; I kind of figured they were there to vote in favor of outcomes they were in favor of. Heck, when a candidate helpfully explains what they’re in favor of, and I agree with them, I vote accordingly in hopes that they’ll vote accordingly; I don’t vote in hopes of them doing the reverse, because that’d be downright weird.
In 2016, they figured the president wouldn’t give them a nominee they’d be in favor of, and they figured the upcoming election might give them one who’d give them a nominee they’d be in favor of, and so they — responded accordingly, instead of doing the reverse. In 2020, they figured they already had a president who’d give them a nominee they’d be in favor of, and so they — responded accordingly, instead of doing the reverse.
“So what?”, as you put it, is that politics in a democracy (or “democratic republic” if you prefer a more precise description) is about compromise and respect for the legislative norms developed over many decades of mostly civil governance. That is to say, a clever legislator can stick to a “strict interpretation” of the the foundational law and find ways to undermine democratic norms that are purely within the bounds of the law, if not strictly legal precedent. This is particularly true for the Constitution, which was a document written by exclusively white, mostly land-owning, majority slaveholding men to protect their ideals of liberty, posterity, and property rights, and was not much inclined to establish any of these for women or non-Europeans.
In the case of Supreme Court nominations, the long established precedent is that any candidate that the President nominates and who willingly stands forward is offered a hearing, which is an expectation which had been the norm for nearly a century and a half when Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley nullified it by logifying that it wasn’t ‘fair’ that an outgoing President should get to propose a candidate for a Supreme Court vacancy, a ‘rule’ that has never been any kind of norm or unwritten understanding, and was undermined when the roles were reversed and ‘their’ President nominated a candidate with radical Fundamentalist Christian views despite being less than two months to the next presidential election. Even Robert Bork, who was considered questionable by many then-moderate Republicans, got his hearing and was voted down by a bipartisan vote, a valid result that conservative Republicans haven’t been able to shut the fuck up about for the last four decades as having deprived the nation of the “finest legal mind in the country” [facts not in evidence]. Garland didn’t even get that satisfaction of being able to whinge about being roasted over hot coals; he was just shoved into a box with a label, “Return to Sender”.
Setting aside “democratic norms”, the reality is that Merrick Garland stood a chance of being confirmed by the 114th Congress despite a +4 Senate GOP majority because there were still a few Republicans that might reach across the aisle for a moderate ‘compromise’ candidate like Garland. So McConnell and Grassley used procedural machinations to avoid Garland’s nomination ever coming to the floor of the Senate for a vote. In other words, they subverted not just norms but the democratic process of allowing elected officials to decide a critical matter of governance in accordance with what they believed to be the intentions of their constituents. There is no way to view this other than being a corruption of democratic institutions, executed in plain sight and inarguably evident by a total reversal of the applied logic four years later complete with a trademark McConnell “grin and thumb” to let America know that he’s got his finger up its rectum and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
And this gets to the fundamental issue of why the GOP is irredeemably corrupt; it is no longer a normal political party that views the American politic as a constituency as something to be wooed and won by rhetorical argument and evidence. It now views the voting public as an enemy to be subdued, either by xenophobic and racist polemic or by direct suppression, disenfranchising or intimidating anyone who does not fall into a party line that is not only counterproductive to even their own interests but is often self-contradictory. As vicious as Republican attacks can be on their opposition, their internecine conflict is even worse, purging their ranks of not only anyone who doesn’t hew to an increasingly autocratic view of governance but actually attacking anyone who might even be associated with someone who might ‘compromise’. The GOP’s unhinged and abusive attacks and expulsion of Cindy McCain—who never expressed any interest in running for elective office herself and is mostly devoted to non-partisan humanitarian efforts—for the twin sins of not backing Donald Trump and being the widow of a conservative Republican who had the sagacity to compromise with Democratic colleges and boost an agenda by a Democratic president (which itself was largely cribbed from prior Republican plans) tells you everything you need to now about the current GOP.
The Republican party is no longer an actual political party because it isn’t interested in politics or the inherent compromise of democratic governance; it is interested in control, dominance, and subjugation, and largely guided by avowed proto-fascists, with uber-hypocrite Newt Gingrich sitting in as Privy Counsellor of their Star Chamber, guiding them on semantics and the right way to say, “Nggr, nggr, nggr”, courtesy of Lew Atwater and those who came before to promulgate the “Southern Strategy” into the current era. It doesn’t need to actually win elections as long as it can contest them on the most farcical of bases, and then encourage its base to intimidate election officials into resigning while manipulating the appointment of sympathetic justices to lifetime appointments.
“So what?” is essentially what a lot of Germans thought about Hitler and the NSDAP in 1933, before the “Night of Long Knives”. And after that, many of them were too afraid to speak up. Go ahead, tell me I’m being histrionic. And then look at the CPAC 2021 stage design and tell me they aren’t trolling like a bassmaster.