Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove, The Other McCain and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Justice Ginsburg is having more health issues; if she dies or is forced to resign, David Axelrod is claiming that the next Trump appointee will face a battle that makes the Kavanaugh hearings look like a schoolyard scrap. Uh huh. Excerpt:
A former Obama adviser set the stage for a potentially nasty confirmation fight in the Senate next year within an hour of the Supreme Court announcing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently completed three weeks of radiation treatment after doctors found a localized cancerous tumor on her pancreas.
“If there is a SCOTUS vacancy next year and @senatemajldr carries through on his extraordinary promise to fill it-despite his own previous precedent in blocking Garland-it will tear this country apart,” David Axelrod said in a tweet Friday afternoon.
He was referring to how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier this year that the Senate would consider a presidential nominee to fill a vacancy on the court if one occurred in 2020.
“Oh, we’d fill it,” the Kentucky Republican said at an event in May.
That upset Democrats who remember the role McConnell played in blocking consideration of then-President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. At the time, he defended Republicans’ decision not to hold a confirmation hearing for Garland because it was a presidential election year.
To the paragraph immediately above I can only say this: Politics is a nasty business, and were positions reversed, I’m abso-damn-lutely certain Chuck Schumer would have done the same thing. When worn on the other foot, the shoe pinches.
But, yes, should President Trump get another appointment, which he almost certainly will, watch – the long knives will indeed come out. It won’t matter who he nominates; the Democrats will dig into every possible aspect of the nominee’s background, down to and including his/her kindergarten teacher: “Judge (Name), I have hear a sworn deposition from Mrs. Karen McGillicuddy, your Goforth Elementary school kindergarten teacer, that you once refused to help clean the chalkboard erasers alongside a student of color. Now we demand a response to these allegations!”
It’s going to be epic. And it’s going to be silly. And, barring some sort of upset in the Senate in November 2020, which doesn’t look likely, Trump will eventually win, and his nominee will be seated on the Court.
