Category: Supreme Court

Never forget how Republicans treated Garland

Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat.  That has permanent ramifications.

“Republican-appointed justices have now constituted the majority of the Court for five decades in a row”

I will be 65 later this year.  There has never been a Chief Justice appointed by a Democrat in my lifetime.

The difference between a conservative court and a court with a right-leaning agenda

This is a very thoughtful analysis by a conservative.

It states “In several of the most controverted areas that the Court has entered and in which its decisions have had a profound effect on law and on our national life—voting rights, gerrymandering, affirmative action, abortion, campaign finance, and most recently mandatory agency fees to public sector unions—the Court has undermined or overturned precedents that embodied longstanding and difficult compromise settlements of sharply opposed interests and principles. These decisions are not the work of a conservative Court.”

Prior Democratic votes on Supreme Court finalists

They have already been voted on by the Senate for lower judicial positions.  I expect Trump’s nominee to be approved by a small margin.

Only politics will matter for the Supreme Court nomination fight

This article makes excellent points:

“In all the pieces already written about the impending fight to confirm Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s as-yet unpicked successor on the Supreme Court, no one has so much as suggested that anything besides partisanship and ideology will matter. Credentials? Qualifications? Scandal? Racial, ethnic and gender diversity? All of these considerations, so prominent in judicial appointment debates for decades, are largely irrelevant. It’s pure politics now, and no one pretends otherwise.”

It has lots of history of nominations and notes: “After the Bush v. Gore decision that gave George W. Bush the presidency—a 5-4 decision that both kicked off our era of partisan polarization and underscored the partisanship at work in the Supreme Court—several observers said it was time to drop the pretense that politics wasn’t central to the confirmation process.”

Here are some of the votes before Bush v. Gore:

O’Connor was approved 99-0

Scalia was approved 98-0

Kennedy was approved 97-0

Ginsburg was approved 96-3

Breyer was approved 87-9

I doubt that any future nominee will get 60 votes and the voting will be primarily along party lines.  McConnell really amped up partisanship by stealing a seat.  There will never be a moderate pick again.  Trump has no interest in uniting the country but picking a centrist justice would be a good start.

Since Republicans are picking extreme conservatives, I expect Democrats to pick extreme liberals when the get their chance.  Down the road, all decisions will be strictly along party lines.