President Obama has announced his supreme court nominee.
A couple of things. Merrick Garland is not, as claimed by the current spiel from Mitch McConnell and company, an ideologue. There is a track record of bi-partisan endorsements dating back to the 90s to so testify. No one who has ever worked with the man has ever called him an ideologue. This is not open for dispute. He is a jurist and from all the evidence a man of integrity.
Two, while they keep bringing up the Biden Rule, bear in mind the Biden Rule was a statement on what the Senate is constitutionally required to do and, further, an opinion, one which the Democratic Party has never adhered to even when it sounded like they might. There was no vacancy to be debated at the time when then-Senator Joseph Biden made his statements. But even if one wishes to use that as some kind of defense, it is nevertheless a fact that the Biden Rule was never adopted as A Rule. Republicans certainly opted to disregard it and history shows that it has never proven a hindrance or an error for a president to nominate for a vacancy during his last year in office. Now that it appears likely Obama will choose someone who could as easily rule against the GOP agenda as for it, they bring it up and try to make it sound like there is precedent. There is no precedent.
McConnell’s assertion that the president should allow the People a voice in such a selection is disingenuous. The People did. They re-elected Obama by a considerable margin. This is simply an opportunity for him to fulfill that confidence and do the job for which he was elected.
So they have no precedent. They have no moral ground for blocking this. They are risking committing political suicide, in fact, which suggests that they are not listening to their constituents but to their paymasters. There are several matters before the court this year which, had Scalia survived, might have gone in favor of the Right Wing agenda. With Scalia gone, that certainty is no more. They hope a Republican will be elected.
On that, though, all of them have come out against their Party frontrunner, Donald Trump. If he becomes president, according to their recent comments, it will be a disaster. So they won’t get what they want even if the GOP takes the White House. They must secretly hope Hillary or Bernie wins. But if that happens, then their nominee, certainly in the case of Sanders, will be even farther from their ideological hopes. Unless they intend, if Hillary wins, to mire her presidency in endless specious “hearings” about presumed “crimes.”
All of which tells anyone with half a brain that all they want is to block government from functioning at all.
Of course, if a Democrat wins in November and they retain control of the Senate and agree to advise and consent, then the problem must have been an unwillingness to work with a black man. Ideology we can assume will not change, at least not sufficiently to matter.
On a personal note, I suspect this will get them drummed out of office. The Robertson-Scalia court has handed down some of the most regressive decisions in the past two decades. Just to name one, Citizens United. I will not exercise here the problems—the moral problems—with that decision. It is bad jurisprudence. It is a mockery of even the thing the Right purports to defend, namely the importance of the individual. It negated that importance by allowing a functional redefinition of what constitutes an individual. They claim not to like Socialism, but that ruling allowed a form of aggregate personhood which elevated private aggregates to a virtually autonomous condition operationally akin to a kind of collectivism. That it exists as a privately-held corporate entity does not change that fact that now we actually have some “persons” more equal than everybody else.
Whatever one may feel about the past seven years, in this President Obama has history, logic, and morality on his side. It’s his job, his duty, and frankly his privilege, and it is the Senate’s job and duty to advise and consent. History and tradition and even logic are against them, because likely they will have a harder choice of nominees this time next year. What they are doing makes no sense at all. It is posturing.
Which is growing very old. They’re making the Democrats look better than perhaps they really are.
But they always showed up with their wives or girlfriends.
There is no presumption about Hillary’s crimes. She has broken the law, lied and committed fraud all the way up to treason.
Hillary winning the Presidency would be a disaster for America, although given the division within the Democratic party were she to get the nomination it is doubtful she could win the White House as well.