If the Dems take the Senate and decide to block all nominations, they are making a political decision, just like the GOP did. And they will have to deal with the fallout, if any, just like the GOP did.
The Senate Republicans gambled and won. Dems are free to try the same, and find out if the electorate sees any difference between not acting on a nominee during the last year of a President who is certainly a lame duck, vs. not acting on a nominee during the last two years or so when it isn’t at all certain that he is a lame duck. The Dems are going to look a little silly if and when Trump is re-elected.
Maybe the electorate won’t care very much if the Supreme Court has a vacant seat for years. Maybe they will, and it helps the Dems. That’s a political gamble, but maybe it’s worth taking, just as the somewhat less consequential gamble the GOP took was worth taking. Or maybe it will be one of the more liberal Justices who dies or retires. How long will it be worthwhile to put up with losing 5-3? IYSWIM.
It’s rather similar to how the GOP escalated when they impeached Clinton. How did that work out for them?
I would like to see Democrats simultaneously do two things:
(1) Pick much more aggressive fights on voting rights. Democrats should be centering messages about the unfairness of felony disenfranchisement. They should be running on the issues of ridiculous gerrymandering and voter purging and suppression tactics. They should be fighting for statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. They should fight for automatic voter registration in every state. They should reduce the minimum voting age to 16 and enfranchise every lawful permanent residents.
(2) De-escalate the fights over the judiciary. This has to be a conscious negotiation. Mitch McConnell can’t be trusted (not just because he is a grifter, but because he doesn’t have the power to keep any commitment). But then the same could be said of Khruschev. Trust but verify. Start by returning the blue slip process once Senate Democrats return to power. Work to find compromise candidates for the courts of appeals. The politicized judiciary is a disaster and the only way out is bilateral disarmament treaties.
America can and has survived hard-edged cold war politics over who can vote and who should win elections. America cannot survive with the current utterly broken legislative branch and if the judiciary also dies, which is the ultimate result if things are not de-escalated. We’re hobbling along with two branches as it is. Kill one more, and we’re in real trouble.
While I agree that felony disenfranchisement is unfair, this is a political non-starter. Republicans have successfully portrayed Democrats as soft on crime for decades. Can you imagine the hay they’d make out of a campaign that champions convicted felons?
Playing dirty resulted in the republicans getting Trump as their top guy, Democratic Trump might be fun but I don’t think it’s the outcome most of you would prefer.
I don’t mark everything in the space of politics up to “meh, it’s just politics, sometimes something works out and sometimes it doesn’t.”
I think it is respectable to have certain standards in society beyond which the law compels us to undertake, rather than leaving it up to every person to do just as much as they can get away with - whether in everyday life, business, or politics.
This expectation of various standards of conduct is what separates normal people from telemarketers.
Still, I can’t imagine anyone running on this issue in a a non-urban district against a viable GOP candidate. Once in office, yes – start making the case that people who have done their time deserve to have their political voice restored to them.
Pretty much. The problem here is that electoral power, if you’re willing to throw norms out the window, compounds. The 2010 redistricting handed the republican party 10 years of massive structural advantages. Stealing Garland’s seat netted the republicans a continuation of a long-standing majority on SCOTUS, which has led to win after win for the republican party, including in cases where the outcome of the case makes it harder for democrats to vote. The 2020 census is liable to be even worse than 2020 and the RedMap folks are openly bragging about what they’re going to do (rather than joining a convent and self-flagellating as one might be wont to do) this time around.
“Accept the shift of norms and turn it around on the republicans” isn’t good enough. It still leaves the Republicans with a massove first mover advantage with structural power that compounds every time they break first. The response to this kind of norm-breaking needs to be not “all right, we’ll operate within the norms you violated” but “okay, you wanna play like that? Boom, 4 new democrat SCOTUS justices.”
So these two things are Exactly The Same Thing™:
(1) Asking a President to submit a name who’s not wing-bat right-wing and who would be acceptable enough for 60 fair-minded Senators;
(2) Telling a President that no matter what name he submits, his appointments will all be rejected for the remaining nine months of his term.
It doesn’t really matter what the GOP would do in response to Democratic Court-packing; what matters is that the Democrats actually do it in the first place.
Again, there have to be severe, extreme, and long-lasting consequences for the Garland seat theft. Such consequences would be even more important to carry out if and when a future right wing SCOTUS issues an obviously political and hackish decision against a signature Democratic law.
Right. Like how the democrats have responded to the republican norm-breaking by… Uh… What have they done, again?
Neither equilibrium is stable. Neither equilibrium works. In one case, we have an escalation of broken norms, where one side consistently breaks norms and gains an advantage from it, and then the other side eventually matches them, missing out on the first-move advantage the other side got. Why should that side ever deescalate? There’s no effective threat to them!
In the other case, we again have an escalation of broken norms, but while the system rewards norm-breaking, it does so without leaving those rewards one-sided, and makes it clear to both sides that a deescalation may be in their best interests.
The original nuclear option. Which was viewed by Dems as a horrible unconscionable thing when the Republican Senate was thinking about it under the Bush Administration… then it became a thing they rallied around. Then it got Gorsuch confirmed. (The same parliamentary tactic, that is.)