Blame game: Trump lays it in Obama’s lap
Nearly every president faults the one before him, but his talk of the ‘mess’ he was left turns it up a notch
President WASHINGTON Trump seems to have a pretty clear idea who to blame for many of the problems that cross his desk in the Oval Office. It’s President Obama. From the civil war in Syria and the nuclear showdown with North Korea to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt and problems with health care, the 45th president has blasted the 44th for misguided policies and weak leadership that have left him with a multitude of troubles to fix. He even accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign.
“I have to just say that the world is a mess,” Trump lamented at a Rose Garden news conference Wednesday with Jordanian King Abdullah II. “Whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s North Korea, whether it’s so many other things, whether it’s in our country — horrible trade deals — I inherited a mess.”
Just about every president is elected after campaigns that promise a change in direction,
least initially, from the courts to which they aspired. Some, such as Bork and Haynsworth, were Supreme Court nominees defeated on the Senate floor. Others, such as Roberts and Kagan, made their way to the high court after partisan fights over their appeals court nominations.
Republicans say Democrats started it. “They seem to be hurtling toward the abyss this time and trying to take the Senate with them,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said during this week’s debate. “The future of the Senate will hang on their choice.”
Democrats say Republicans precipitated this week’s final act with their treatment of Garland last year.
“He leaves out an important chapter, the last chapter, the one that brought us to this moment in the United States Senate,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., responded. POLITICS ENSNARE COURTS The judicial juggernaut that ensnared two of the nation’s most esteemed federal judges over the past 14 months — men considered by senators from both parties to be supremely qualified for the Supreme Court — has a rich history:
1999: President Clinton was blocked by Republicans from filling 16 federal appeals court vacancies, including the seat on the D.C. Circuit intended for Elena Kagan — who eventually won confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2010.
2001: President George W. Bush sought to fill a number of federal court vacancies soon after his election — one of which, on the D.C. Circuit, would have gone to John Roberts — but was blocked by Democrats. Roberts made it to the appeals court in 2003 under a Republican-controlled Senate en route to his current job as chief justice.
2003: Bush’s battles with Democrats over judicial nominations reached a head two years later, when they filibustered four appeals court nominees — most notably Miguel Estrada, who eventually withdrew his name. A bipartisan settlement allowed some nominees through, including William Pryor, now a federal appeals court judge who was on President Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.
2006: Bush’s choice of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court seat vacated by moderate Sandra Day O’Connor met a filibuster by Democrats, but they managed only 25 of the 41 votes needed to succeed. Alito was confirmed, by a 58-42 vote.
2013: President Obama met a wall of resistance from Senate Republicans for many of his lower court nominees, a battle that culminated at the start of his second term over three seats on the D.C. Circuit. To get Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Wilkins confirmed, Senate Democrats invoked the first iteration of the “nuclear option” by changing rules for executive branch and lower court nominees.
2016: Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia was intended as an olive branch to Republicans, since Garland was older (63) and more moderate than other potential nominees. But McConnell vowed the night Scalia died to hold the seat open for the next president, and Garland never got a hearing. DEMS START, GOP ESCALATES
Martin Gold, former counsel to two Senate Republican majority leaders and an expert on Senate procedure, said the fight over judges has been “careening ” toward this week’s culmination since Bork was defeated 30 years ago. He noted Democrats were the first to defeat judicial nominees by filibuster in 2003.
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said both parties have played roles in escalating the battle, “but the balance is worse on the Republican side.”
Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution, a political science professor at George Washington University, was more diplomatic in assessing blame. She saw only a “parliamentary arms race where one party does something, the other party tries to push back.”
Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, blamed Democrats as the instigators and Republicans as the annihilators.
During the Reagan years and again under Bush, Democrats blocked lower court judges they considered too conservative. The epitome was Estrada, whom Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., compared to “a Stealth missile — with a nose cone — coming out of the right wing’s deepest silo.”
Republicans, Goldman said, responded forcefully by bottling up Obama’s nominees to lower courts even when ideology wasn’t a problem. That led Democratic leader Harry Reid to do for lower courts in 2013 what McConnell did Thursday for the Supreme Court — strip the minority party of its ability to filibuster.
“The Republicans are master fighters at this,” Goldman said. “They do payback like we’ve never seen before.”
“They seem to be hurtling toward the abyss this time and trying to take the Senate with them.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to Democrats