Supreme picks face all-out warfare

After successfully delivering the secret knock and password, a beleaguered, unshaven older man walks into the bunker, stomping out the cold from his feet on the way in. He walks over to one of the garbage-can fires, where his younger yet battlehardened comrades are gathered, strategizing about the fight to come. As the grizzled veteran rubs his hands over the flames, his eyes glinting in the firelight, he says to them, wistfully, “You know, Supreme Court nomination fights weren’t always like this.”

It’s not quite that bad yet in Washington, but the year is young and the fight over Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has just begun.

Whenever there is a Supreme Court vacancy, a preemptive wave of exhaustion comes over me. It’s the same arguments every time.

Some process arguments migrate from one party to another depending on which side is on defense or offense. “The nominee deserves a speedy hearing and confirmation,” lobbyists on congressional elections. So why should it surprise anyone that when the Supreme Court acts like another Congress, special interests will act likewise?

If forced to fix blame on the primary cause of this mess, it was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which invented a constitutional right to abortion. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has conceded that the case short-circuited the democratic process and prevented a national consensus from forming on how to deal with the issue.

“My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” she said in 2013 on Roe’s 40th anniversary.

Whatever you think of Roe v. Wade, the decision is emblematic of the court’s evolution into a lawmaking body. Once that happened, it was inevitable that the process would be Borkified. What’s remarkable is not that it happened, but that it took so long.