Preemptive rejection? Bucket!
by Tom Sullivan
Does anyone imagine that if a Republican president were residing in the White House, prominent Republicans would insist that he abdicate his responsibility to the next president to appoint a replacement for a Supreme Court justice? But insisting a Democrat must is what passes for a principled stand in today's Republican Party. One Republican rule set when they hold power; another Republican rule set when Democrats do. They who used to accuse the left of relativism have come to embrace it. Proudly. As Richard Nixon did in saying, "Flexibility is the first principle of politics."
Steve Benen points out how Republicans responded within minutes of notice of Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death by challenging the very legitimacy of the president's authority to nominate Scalia's replacement:
The GOP majority ... has embraced a course that corrupts the process with a showdown unlike anything seen in the modern era. The high court vacancy must remain unfilled for at least 11 months, they say, regardless of the consequences, all because of the unbridled disgust Republicans have for President Obama.
Indeed, to further their obviously ridiculous case, GOP senators have even begun making up rules that didn’t exist before the weekend...
Let’s make this plain: the “no confirmations in an election year” rule simply does not exist. Period. Full stop.
Paul Krugman cautions against the tendency to blame partisanship for the coming confirmation chaos and against buying into "false symmetry" between the two parties. He cites the deep differences between Republicans and Democrats in both policy and values. Plus, "only one party has gone off the deep end." How does he justify saying that?
One answer is, compare last week’s Democratic debate with Saturday’s Republican debate. Need I say more?
Beyond that, there are huge differences in tactics and attitudes. Democrats never tried to extort concessions by threatening to cut off U.S. borrowing and create a financial crisis; Republicans did. Democrats don’t routinely deny the legitimacy of presidents from the other party; Republicans did it to both Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama. The G.O.P.’s new Supreme Court blockade is, fundamentally, in a direct line of descent from the days when Republicans used to call Mr. Clinton “your president.”
Republicans seem to believe they represent the only real America — conservative America, Republican America. The Republican party has given itself over to the proposition that should a Democrat reside in the Executive Mansion, she/he occupies it, and America has been taken hostage. If Republicans lose, somebody cheated. (Guess who?)
Speaking of cheating, take last weekend's preemptive calls by Republican lawmakers for the Kenyan Usurper to back off nominating a replacement for the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. This one, for example:
Justice Scalia was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 13, 2016
Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic takes a rather dim view of that suggestion, writing, "That isn’t a call to fulfill the 'advice and consent' function and to reject a bad nominee. It is a naked call for a strategic delay." Not so strategic if the Democrat moving into the White House next January nominates someone further to the left than we might see from Barack Obama. Friedersdorf continues:
But the Senate does have an obligation to fulfill its “advice and consent” obligation. Says the Constitution, the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court...” A preemptive rejection of any possible Supreme Court appointment is self-evidently in conflict with that obligation. The phrase “do not let it become about whoever Obama names” makes that explicit.
A man as versed in the Constitution as Senator Cruz should be embarrassed to posit that the nation could owe a debt to Scalia, that a “debt” to a dead man should play any role in a process governed by the Constitution, or that a sitting president’s nominee should be preemptively rejected before his or her identity is known. There is no agreed upon standard of what legitimate advice and consent entails. But any standard that rejects a nomination before it is even made fails the laugh test.
And speaking of laughs, perhaps Obama is feeling loose enough that throwing down with a recalcitrant Republican Senate is on his final-year "bucket list":