HERE COMES THE JUDGE

As we mourn the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and contemplate Mitch McConnell’s infamy, let’s remember that the Republican Party is shameless.  Nevertheless, it’s still appropriate to shame them when they do something shameful, which is pretty much every day.  In that spirit, I’ll say “fuck Mitch McConnell and the horse he rode in on.”  Nah, let’s leave the horse out of it. 

There’s no reason to let McConnell and his Republican colleagues off the hook, but there’s also no reason to expect that appeals to logic, much less conscience, will have any impact.

The truth is that McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 was not a matter of principle, although he couched it that way.  Right vs. wrong didn’t enter into it.  It was a power play, and in 2016, McConnell had leverage (not to mention an overly-complacent Democratic Party). 

Now he’s announced another power play.  He doesn’t care whether his public rationale is consistent with the one he put forward four years ago.  It only matters whether he has enough leverage to force a vote on a Trump Supreme Court nominee between now and November 3. 

[Or maybe between November 4 and January 19.  McConnell said that Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the floor of the Senate, but if he calculates that the political risks are too great in the heat of the campaign, he can wait and call his outgoing Republican majority back for a lame duck session after the election is over.]

Why might he want to wait?  For one thing, Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination would pull three Republican incumbents – Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst, and Thom Tillis – off the campaign trail and back to Washington at a time when they’re facing stiff challenges from Democrats.  For another, he’ll need to be sure in advance that he won’t face another John McCain-Obamacare moment, falling short of a majority because a few Republican senators decide to vote no, either on the nominee or the nomination itself.  

It’s true that a few GOP senators got so carried away in excusing McConnell’s 2016 power play that they spoke of it on the record as a principle:  no election-year Supreme Court nominations.  How likely are they to stick to that principle in 2020?  I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see many candidates for a Profiles In Courage reboot among the current crop of Republican senators.

Finally, appointing (or even attempting to appoint) an anti-Roe judge would ensure that abortion becomes a hot button campaign issue.  I don’t suppose it will boost Democratic turnout much –   Democrats are already prepared to crawl over broken glass if that’s what it takes to cast a vote against Trump.  Now they’ll crawl over broken glass and electrified barbwire, if need be.  But Democrats only vote once (if we’re not cheated out of the opportunity), and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any wavering Democrats who were thinking about sitting this one out until RBG passed. 

Nevertheless, polls suggest that independents generally prefer “safe, legal, and rare” rather than an outright ban on abortion.  Since Trump and several Republican senatorial candidates need all the independent votes they can get, deferring the crisis until after the election might make sense.

I assume that McConnell is mulling all this over – and also mulling over the possibility that this is his last shot at the Supreme Court for a good long time, so why not go for it?  If I were a betting man, that’s how I’d wager.