Why Dems must go all out to win Senate
Kennedy retirement underscores the stakes
Between Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement and “RBG,” the new documentary about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the stakes of the midterm elections could not be more clear. From the George W. Bush presidency to state attempts to restrict voting to this week’s blow to union finances, one 5-4 decision after another changes the course of the nation. Yet you could show “RBG” to every adult Democrat in America and odds are that wouldn’t drive them to the polls.
Conservatives have been motivated for decades by the court’s central place in history and the Senate’s role in shaping the court. Democrats should be too, but they aren’t. This year, they are preoccupied with winning the House, and that would certainly be better than nothing. It would allow them to set the agenda on taxes, spending, oversight and (perhaps) impeachment — and give them bargaining power on all issues. Yet it’s almost more urgent to go for the Senate. The odds are longer, but the outcome will have massive consequences over the next half-century. Which brings us back to the court. Just in the past few weeks, the 5-4 conservative majority has handed down decisions that curtailed voting rights, sharply narrowed redress for union members as well as labor’s political clout, and upheld President Donald Trump’s travel ban centered on majority-Muslim countries. In the next year or two, the court could be weighing in on your access to health insurance.
From abortion, guns and privacy to voting, gay and worker rights, from immigration to criminal justice to who gets to draw political maps and contribute to campaigns, the Supreme Court is in all of our lives. It should be a major voting issue for Democrats in every election. But even in 2016, it wasn’t.
That was the year President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland 10 months before his term ended. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his passive-aggressive majority refused to consider Garland, effectively shrinking Obama’s presidency from four years to three. That was the most outrageous partisan obstructionism in memory. Yet in several key states and demographics, Democratic turnout fell.
Now we have the results: Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative Trump pick who, at age 50, likely has another 25 to
30 years on the court. Kennedy’s retirement, giving Trump another pick. And two liberal seats held by Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, age 85 and 79, respectively. It isn’t being disrespectful to say anything could happen — and if it happens while Trump is president and the Senate is Republican, the court could go from a 5-4 conservative majority to a
6-3 or even 7-2 conservative majority. This is not the America most people prefer, considering that Hillary Clinton won 3 million more popular votes than Trump. There is a disconnect, however, in conveying the mechanics of Supreme Court nominations and their effect on real life. At the height of the Garland controversy, the Pew Research Center found that seven in 10 Democrats had a favorable view of the court.
Brian Fallon, executive director of a new group called Demand Justice, attributed this to court rulings upholding legal abortion and gay marriage. But he told me voters are missing “the quiet work that the court is doing to undermine workers’ rights” and “the slowly emerging threat” on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. “I think we are years away from having a progressive base that is cultivated enough to treat this as a voting issue,” he said, adding not even donors are as mobilized as they need to be.
One approach is to fold the court into the economic message Democrats already are using — to frame the probusiness, anti-worker court as “part of the rigged economy,” as Fallon put it. Democrats must summon the money to make the strongest argument possible for a Democratic Senate. If that’s economics, fine. All that matters is the result: prevailing over a GOP majority positioned to install an ideological, outof-touch Supreme Court empowered to impose its will for generations.