There is no reason for Senate Democrats to filibuster against Neil Gorsuch’s perfectly legitimate nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court except for the kind of nonsense U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham uttered Monday.
And that’s no good reason at all, really. The brazen effrontery of a blabbermouth Republican senator from South Carolina has nothing to do with Gorsuch or the merit of his nomination.
Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee took turns at a hallway microphone Monday after they had provided Gorsuch’s nomination with a do-pass recommendation by a vote of 11-9. For his turn, Graham said he would vote on the floor for the so-called nuclear option to repeal the filibuster option on Supreme Court nominations — and thus get Gorsuch confirmed by a simple majority vote, since 42 Senate Democrats seemed ready to deny the 60 votes needed to end their filibuster.
Then Graham explained why he would vote that way, saying, “I’m not going to be part of a Senate where Democrats get their judges and Republicans can never get theirs. That’s not what it’s all about.”
Was he kidding us? It’s precisely the other way around.
Perhaps Graham was asleep during 2016, when he ran comically for president. Or, more likely, he loves the sound of his drawl more than he thinks about the substance.
A vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court arose in February 2016 on the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. In March, then-President Barack Obama nominated an appeals court judge named Merrick Garland, who was as perfectly meritorious as Gorsuch.
For the rest of the year, indeed until Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Senate Republicans refused to give Garland even a hearing. Their design was to wait and see if they could get a Republican president, thus, in the words of Graham, “get their judge” and keep the Democrats from “getting theirs.”
Democrats apparently are engaging in payback. It’s pointless. Gorsuch is as qualified and no more conservative than any nominee Trump might choose in his place. Gorsuch is going to be confirmed, probably with the nuclear option removing the filibuster. And that probably will amount to a destructive setback for long Senate practice.
And, as momma told us, two wrongs don’t make a right.
It’s a political loser for Democrats to filibuster a nomination vengefully. It’s like the football game when a player gets flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. The video replay inevitably shows that the penalized player was merely retaliating for a cheap shot against him, unseen by the official.
So it goes. Stuff happens. You must move on.
Trump is president, thanks to the antiquated Electoral College and the terribly misguided decisions of blue-collar voters. As president, Trump gets to make this nomination and probably one or two more. He will reshape the Supreme Court, meaning constitutional law, for a generation. It will be tragic for women, minorities and the environment, and a boon for big money.
What it comes down to is that Election Day 2016 imposed a four-year doom on the country, but voting against Gorsuch does nothing to change that.
The best reason Senate Democrats can contrive to oppose Gorsuch is that he was evasive in his answers to their questions. But judge nominees should be evasive in their answers to politicians. They shouldn’t pre-judge for a Democratic senator, or a Republican senator, or anybody, any cases that might come before them.
The only valid reasons to oppose Gorsuch would be if he’d made some sort of incompetent ruling as a judge or if there was some scandal in his background. He hadn’t. There wasn’t.
Meantime, nearly as offensive as Graham was Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Asked what he would say to Garland, Grassley said he would tell him he didn’t get considered only because of the “Biden Rule.”
The “Biden Rule” goes back to a speech Joe Biden made in late June 1992 in the closing months of President George H.W. Bush’s fourth year as a first-term president. Biden was the Senate Judiciary Chairman.
What Biden said was that, if a Supreme Court vacancy arose at that point, Bush shouldn’t make a nomination because of the distraction of the presidential election and the possibility that Bill Clinton might beat him.
It’s similar, yes, but different. This was June, not February. There was no actual vacancy; Biden was saying a nomination shouldn’t be made by the president if a vacancy arose, not that the Senate ought to sit on one.
Oh, well. Republicans can utter all the nonsense they want and it won’t change the facts that Merrick Garland is not going on the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch is.
You must pick your fights. It’s better to pick ones you can win rather than ones emotions have you itching to make.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.