Hey Bricker, did you actually listen to the speech in question?
I guess not. I recommend you do it. I had a sick day recently and decided that with all the mostly-dead travel time in Metroid Prime*, I might as well run that in the background. The message, roughly boiled down, was that the people’s faith in the judicial selection process has been shaken by a pair of presidents who have completely remade the ideological makeup of the court despite facing a senate that opposed them, and that, if a justice were to resign, the President should please not nominate another hard-line right-winger like Thomas or Scalia, as this would necessarily force a very nasty and ugly battle in the senate that would rob the process of its credibility in the eyes of the everyday citizen.
A few pertinent differences today:
[ol]
[li]Can’t use that excuse any more; that bridge has been burned pretty thoroughly.[/li][li]It’s about radicalism and the makeup of the court, not just saying “no” to the president and stalling for almost an entire year with the hopes of a better outcome.[/li][li]Biden would have been perfectly fine with a moderate; McConnell apparently is not. [/li][/ol]
There’s probably more, but the gist of it is not, “Mr. President, we’re not going to let you nominate anyone else because you’re about to leave office in 11 months.”
*(there’s a whole lot of trekking back and forth through beautiful locations to find that one freakin’ door I couldn’t open 20 minutes ago but now can)
Did you listen to the speech? No? Didn’t think so. So please stop acting like a short, out-of-context segment of it describes its content and context, and please stop acting like a speech where Biden explicitly rebuked fringe aspects of the party who wanted to take a route similar to (albeit even less extreme than) the one McConnell is taking today and very explicitly offers to confirm any moderate the president nominates is the same as Mitch McConnell explicitly saying that Obama should not nominate anyone because his term is almost over.
Also, is it just me or does almost every case of “They Do It Too!” end with the facts showing that, no, in fact, they don’t? Huh. Weird how that works. Almost as if they don’t do it too.
I agree with this in general. But while I think the Democrats are in general even more partisan than the Republicans, and tend to be the first to take things to a new level, I think this particular gambit is one that the Democrats would probably not do. Not because they’re above it, as some here seem to think, but because they won’t need to.
As I see it, the crux is that the Democrats are more closely tied to various delineated interest groups (e.g. African-Americans, Hispanics, “women”) than the Republicans are, and the latter tend to appeal to people more based on broader ideological sympathy. I think what the Republicans have to be afraid of is that Obama will nominate someone with carefully targeted appeal to a specific group that the Democrats are either trying to avoid Republican inroads with or are trying to get riled up for the election, and then put the Republicans in a difficult position of telling some part of the electorate that they can’t get their favorite son/daughter confirmed. (The one that comes to mind offhand is Loretta Lynch, who would be “the first African-American woman on the court!!”, but there could be others.) It’s for this reason that the Republicans need to put out this line that they’re simply not going to confirm anyone at all. By contrast, if the Democrats were themselves in this position, they would just denounce anyone who was nominated as an extremist, and that would be good enough.
In sum, ISTM that due to the current political dynamic the Democrats would pay less of a political price from opposing specific nominees than the Republicans would, and this shapes the strategies that each would take in opposing the nominees.
The problem is that there are no two circumstances which are exactly alike, such that someone deep in denial can’t find something to hang their hat on. It’s still worth pointing these things out because that’s part of the discussion and because you get rare people who are willing to take an open-minded look at the big picture, but you’re never going to convince partisans of anything.
Not just that there is always some random circumstance that they will seize on and claim makes all the difference. It is more that “any nominee I want is a moderate and any nominee that They want is an extreme hard-line radical out-of-the-mainstream fanatic who will rape kittens and use the images or depictions of Phil Mickelson without the express written permission of the PGA”. Therefore I am perfectly justified in doing whatever to oppose their nominee and they are completely wrong to oppose mine.
Because the Constitution is a living document and it says that I am right.
The other part of that Advice and Consent clause talks about ratifying treaties.
The Senate has a treaty before it still pending ratification from 1949. There are 16 treaties pending ratification since before 2000. Both parties have had their turn at the controls. Both parties neglected to schedule a vote and take action.
Both parties have chosen to snarl the judicial confirmation process.
Cite which notes that the median time for Obama (as of late 2015) to put forward a nominee for a District Court once a vacancy was announced was 14 months. This applies to 54 District court vacancies and 15 more where an intent to vacate (retire, etc…) has already been announced). Hard to blame the Senate for not voting when the White House fails to even put forward a nominee.
Wow. Not ratifying a treaty from 1949 is exactly the same thing as deciding that a sitting president who has a year in office can’t fill a vacancy on SCOTUS.
Did you lose a lot of blood and get a transfusion from Bricker?
Well, no. Nobody before you has implied that Scalia was a moderate. His supporters support him for his strong conservatism. Everyone agrees he’s not a moderate.
The question is not whether he should be replaced by a moderate or by a leftist, the question is whether he should be replaced by a leftist or another far-right judge.
They are all examples of the Senate choosing to not undertake action to provide advice and consent. No vote. No hearing. Nothing.
The sitting president has a right, arguably a duty, to make a nomination. It is not the right of the president to “fill a vacancy” without that advice and consent, absent the requirements to make a recess appointment.
And that 1949 treaty… It is a treaty about recognizing the right to organize labor unions and was negotiated by the Truman (D) administration. This is stuff right in the Democrats’ wheelhouse. The Democrats held the majority in the Senate in 1949. They had the ability to schedule hearings and such. They decided not to. Go figure.
And it’s not like these things just fade away. The Obama administration sent a request to the Senate in May 2009 with a list of treaties that the administration considers priority including treaties going back to 1980. They ratified one. And didn’t even hold hearings on most. Dems held a 57-2-49 (D-I-R) advantage in the Senate at the time.
The Republicans have stonewalled the Democrats. The Democrats have stonewalled the Republicans. The Democrats have stonewalled the Democrats. And I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see a Republican Senate stonewalled a Republican appointment or treaty, but admittedly I haven’t sorted through the entire list.
It’s politics. It is a design feature of the government.
…and by and with the Advice **and **Consent of the Senate, shall appoint…
Without the advice and consent of the Senate the president does not have the power to appoint unless circumstances permit a recess appointment.
Advice and Consent was understood to require an affirmative act. Absent that affirmative act, Advice and Consent is not given and the president lacks the power to appoint.