Delaying nominee now is as wrong as in 2016
Within minutes of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement last week, top Senate Democrats declared that a vote on his replacement shouldn’t occur until 2019. It was obvious payback for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s cynical gambit in 2016, when he refused to hold a vote on Judge Merrick Garland.
McConnell’s ploy — delaying action on President Barack Obama’s nominee until after the presidential election — allowed President Donald Trump to name a conservative successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Now the stakes are far higher, and Democrats want to hold up the vote on a replacement for Kennedy — the court’s crucial swing vote — until after the November midterms. They hope to win enough seats to control the Senate and block Trump’s next nominee.
While turnabout might be fair play, it was wrong in 2016 for Republicans to play this card, and Democrats are wrong now to advocate similar obstructionism. When McConnell was blocking consideration of Garland, he told ABC News that March, “The American people are in the middle of choosing who the next president will be. That next president ought to have this appointment.”
That was quite a stretch. It was eight months before the election and 10 before the inauguration. But delay was the GOP’s only chance to prevent a Democrat from trading conservative leader Scalia for a more liberal justice and — most horrifying of all to Republicans — ending conservatives’ longheld balance of power.
Now Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is in the same position and playing the same game. Delay is the only chance for Democrats to block a Trump nominee who would solidify and perpetuate a 5-4 conservative majority. “Our Republican colleagues should follow the rule they set in 2016: not to consider a Supreme Court nominee in an election year,” Schumer said.
Well, that was a presidential election year. This isn’t. And Republicans insist that’s what they meant. Bottom line: It makes no difference. Neither Republican motives in 2016 nor Democratic motives now are pure.
The fireworks were relatively minimal last year when Scalia was replaced by conservative Neil Gorsuch, a onefor-one trade. This time, however, the future of the Supreme Court for a generation or more is at stake. This time, the vacancy comes with the retirement of a conservative justice who nevertheless has been the pivotal swing vote on ideologically fraught cases for decades, supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage and other hard-won rights.
Trump’s list of potential nominees is staunchly conservative; whoever he announces Monday is certain to shift the court’s balance. That the court has become so ideologically split is one tragedy of the country’s polarization. The nation deserves a president and senators who will stop playing this destructive ideological game. For now, that’s certainly not going to happen. But until two wrongs actually make a right, delay is an unfair tactic.