Amy Coney Barrett is going to be nominated. It can’t be stopped.
Given that, the Democrats’ best move here is to attend the hearings, ask reasonable , civil questions any nominee should be asked, and let her go through. This would give Democeats some political capital to use the next time they are in the Republican’s situation, which could easily happen in the next four years.
If you go balls to the wall with threats to burn it all down, pack the court, introduce new states etc., all you are doing is giving Republicans lots of sound bites to throw back in your face if Justice Breyer retires or dies in the last year of a Biden administration, and campaign material for this year.
If there is nothing you can do to stop it, try to figure out how to minimize the blow or even work it to your advantage. Stamping your feet and screaming foul will only hurt you.
Mind you, I remember saying the same thing when Harry Reid abandoned the judicial filibuster. I said it would blow back on the Democrats. And 200 conservative lower court judges and three Supreme Court picks later, I think you’d have to agree that it was a huge mistake.for Democrats to go there.
Normalize the idea of packing the court, and the Republicans may get the chance to do it before you do.
This is just crazy. McConnell was blocking all of Obama’s judge picks. You think if Reid hadn’t changed it, and then the Democrats had tried to block all Trump’s picks, McConnell wouldn’t have gotten rid of it? That’s just crazy if you believe that. Of course McConnell would have gotten rid of it! Getting GOP judges confirmed is his top priority!
The idea that McConnell will act reasonably and decently if only the Democrats do is absolutely insane. The only way to even have a chance of competing is to be just as ruthless.
This is an all out knife fight. What you advocate for the Democrats is just unilateral disarmament. They might as well pack up and go home. Hopefully they’ll fight back.
To be fair, McConnell and Senate Republicans were not blocking all of Obama’s judicial nominations – however they were filibustering several appellate court nominees, particularly to the important DC circuit. Even after Republicans took over the Senate for Obama’s last two years, they confirmed a couple dozen Obama judges. Also, Obama was notoriously unfocused on filling judicial vacancies, especially in his first term, often taking forever to nominate candidates and basically treating it like a distraction.
So I don’t think that Reid and Obama escape some modicum of blame for the situation we find ourselves in. Basically, I think they needed to pick a path: continue to insist on norms of fair consideration of nominees in the Senate or – if they decided to shiv judicial filibusters – have had a plan in place to fill every single open seat before the 2016 election.
Mrs Barrett was the conservative choice when Kavanaugh was selected, they went with him since he was and is a bog standard conservative and she was too right wing.
Is the political calculus here at all changed by the fact that everyone, from the government officials involved to the voters, know that nothing the Democrats do to oppose this will amount to anything?
No doubt Obama should have nominated more judges. But if Reid hadn’t done what he did, McConnell would have an even stronger advantage in the courts today.
Barrett has some big vulnerabilities on the ACA, Roe and worker rights. The Democrats have to hit her hard on those issues while steering clear off attacks on her religious views which will just be a distraction. They probably can’t stop her nomination but the right attacks will shape the final weeks of the campaign and could easily mean an extra Senate seat or two .
After the election , assuming they win, I don’t think court-packing is a good idea though the threat is useful. However they do need to abolish the filibuster quickly and pass as much popular legislation as they can.
Be reasonable, and the Republicans will be reasonable right on back to you? That’s your analysis?
I could imagine you 4 years ago saying: Okay guys, don’t nominate a supreme court pick in an election year. The Republicans really don’t want you to do that and it’s not worth fighting. This way when the situation is reversed, the Republicans will be totally reasonable and not nominate a supreme court justice in an election year for their president.
Of course that’s not what actually happened, as literally anyone even remotely versed in American politics could’ve predicted. The Republicans who said “the prospect of appointing a new Supreme Court Justice 240 days out from election day is crazy!” are now saying “Obviously it is good and proper to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice 40 days from election day. Opposing that idea is pure partisan politics!” without a single one of their supporters even thinking twice about it.
The last 12+ years of Republican politics seem to have completely passed you by. There is absolutely nothing about good faith or abiding norms or compromise or anything even remotely reasonable coming out of the Republican camp in all this time. Their policy is to win in any way they can, through dirty tricks, through lies, through whatever means they can. Never cooperate. Never obey norms when obeying norms helps you. Demand that norms are obeyed when obeying norms help you.
What political capital are you talking about gaining? Republicans voting for the next democrat-nominated Supreme Court Justice?
Your post is straight out of the early 2000s at the latest.
At another point Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, put a hold specifically on Butts and on nominees for the ambassadorships to Sweden and Norway. He had a legitimate gripe with the Obama administration over a Secret Service leak of private information about a fellow member of Congress, and he was trying to pressure Obama to take punitive action. But that issue was unrelated to Butts and the Bahamas.
Cotton eventually released the two other holds, but not the one on Butts. She told me that she once went to see him about it, and he explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president.
Religious nut job, cultist whore is what she is. Simply ask her what’s more important: religion or law. She’ll say something stupid right out of the Bachman playbook.
McConnel would have gotten rid of the judicial filibuster as soon as they had the ability to appoint and confirm judges, and they would have had even more spots to fill, as the judges that were being blocked by the filibuster would not have been seated.
You keep coming back to saying that if the Democrats played by the norms and traditions, then the Republicans would as well, completely ignoring the fact that it is the Republicans that have been violating all the norms and rules, leaving the Democrats to either follow suit, or to allow the Republicans to simply make them irrelevant.
I agree, and the way Democrats approach the confirmation hearings will be critical. Not to stopping the nomination (that horse it out of the barn) but to how her nomination is going to be perceived going into the election.
The worst thing that Democrats can try to do in the hearings is try to paint Barrett as some sort of wild-eyed religious fanatic. They tried it when she was nominated as an appellate judge and it flopped. It was done so ham-handedly that all it ended up doing was making Democrats look intolerant of people with strongly-held religious views. No point going down that road again.
What they should do is confront her directly and repeatedly on the issues, “Do you believe Roe V. Wade was correctly decided?”, “Do you believe that the ACA is constitutional?”, etc. The tradition in these hearings is for the nominee to go mealy-mouthed when asked about a specific point of jurisprudence – “I can’t answer that, Senator, as I may have to rule on the issue should it come before the court. . .” The Democratic response should be: “Bullshit. The American people deserve to know where you stand on these fundamental issues. President Trump says that any nominee of his will automatically overturn Roe V. Wade. By refusing to answer, are you saying he’s wrong?”
Don’t. Let. Up. If necessary, have every Democratic Senator ask her the exact same question over and over. Call her out if she evades the question. Republicans will harrumph over it, but so what? Point out that Tom Cotton has said that any supreme court nominee should state for the record whether he or she will overturn Roe.
I hope that Senate Democrats on the committee have a unified strategy here. Unfortunately, you don’t get into the Senate without an enormous ego and the temptation for each Senator to use his or her time to address their specific interests (“What is your stance on the constitutionality of potato subsidies?”) is strong.
May have been twisted that way by certain media outlets, but I saw it as the Democrats being intolerant of people who wanted to force their religious views on others.
To be blunt, the biggest problem with this line of attack is that Barrett doesn’t look or act like what people expect from a religious zealot. She’s polished, very smart and will have no problem deflecting the charge. Regardless of whether there’s merit to it, Dems can’t waste what very little time they’ll have to confront her directly on something that’s unlikely to stick.