Negotiating With Terrorists
There’s no reason to write a long post. Let me just give you something that bugs me.
For the past year, Democrats have already been openly floating the ideas of (A) scrapping the filibuster; (B) packing the Supreme Court; and (C) adding DC and Puerto Rico as states.
Now, the Democrats tell us if the GOP confirms a Supreme Court pick then the Democrats will do those things they have already been saying they wanted to do.
This time they really mean it.
But they’ve been threatening it all along. Were they lying then? Did they not really mean it?
To be frank, if the GOP does stuff the Democrats don’t like, the Democrats always say they’ll change the rules as soon as they get back in power. This is no different.
The only thing that is different now from every other time is that there is an actual Supreme Court vacancy, it is from the left, the GOP holds the White House and Senate, so the GOP really can move the Court right.
Democrats saying they will do what they’ve said all along they will do should not now shape the outcome.
Also, arguably, the Supreme Court would rule an effort to give DC statehood unconstitutional.
The Democrats and their friends in the media have long said the GOP is more ruthless. Both parties, in fact, claim the other side is always more ruthless and fights dirtier. But it was the Democrats who scrapped the filibuster for nominations.
The GOP only finished it off when the Democrats foolishly filibustered Neil Gorsuch.
At this point, both sides have no incentive to defuse the situation. So they should not. Let me state again a very basic and plain fact — if the Democrats controlled the White House and Senate and a conservative Supreme Court Justice died six weeks before an election, the Democrats would make a mad dash to confirm no matter what threats the GOP made.
Presume a Biden victory in November and a Democrat take over of the Senate by a vote or two. Even then, it will be hard for some of the swing state Democrats to go for broke with their Senate Democrat colleagues in the next Congress.
Regardless, the GOP should not be playing odds or restraining themselves based on what the people who killed the filibuster might kill this time. They should confirm a nominee. The Democrats have made these threats all year. This is nothing new and if they take the Senate back even without a nominee, they’re going to do those things anyway.
They already said they would.
I suspect the truth is that this time, the Democrats really mean it in regard to scrapping the filibuster, adding DC and Puerto Rico as states, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Electoral College, implementing the Green New Deal, removing the second amendment, eliminating ICE and tearing down the border wall, cancelling student debt, paying slavery reparations, and all the things they claim they will do if they are returned to power. The only reason they haven’t done those things so far is that they never had enough political power to do them. President Clinton wanted to, but in his first mid-term, the 1994 Contract with America led to Republicans taking control of the House/Senate, and Democrats plans were stopped dead in their tracks. This led Clinton to start issuing EO’s, which in 1998 Paul Begala described as, “Stroke of the pen. Law of the Land. Kinda cool.” In Obama’s first two years, he achieved what Clinton tried to but didn’t – i.e. passing Obamacare because Bush-hatred (actually Iraq-war-hatred) led to the Democrats having a filibuster-proof Senate margin. When the Tea Party landslide of 2010 crushed Obama’s further plans, he then put Clinton’s “rule by EO” into hyper-drive to overcome the roadblock of the Republican House and the Republican Senate (since 2014). When Trump took over, the Democratic block of the Supreme Court asserted its power (with the help of Roberts) to rule that Trump could not revoke Obama’s DACA EO. The historical pattern is that Democrats always use the maximum power of the elected national offices (President, House, Senate) and appointed court positions to their full advantage, and a subset of Republicans often support their efforts. In 2020, even local political officials (mayors and governors) joined the Democrats fight for control, allowing rioters to destroy their cities because they knew the media would blame Trump and stir up their low-information voters. The only thing the Democrats ever lie about is being moderate. There are a gazillion examples of Democrats landing on both sides of an issue, with Biden flip-flopping on support for Trump’s travel bans, a national-mask-mandate, eliminating fracking, SCOTUS precedent, etc. But after being elected, so-called moderate Democrats are nearly unanimously forced to follow the party line, with Trump’s impeachment being one of many examples. So voters can believe the clear historical pattern or they can believe that Democrats simply want to play nice with Republicans and end division in America, if only people would be sensible and return them to power. That has always been the choice of the 2020 election and the magnitude of this choice is now clearer than it has ever been.
This makes good sense. Go for it. With Democrats running the country for a while, we'll need a well-balanced Court.