It's Thursday, October 27, and Day 256 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell decided no nominee would get any Senate attention: No meetings, no hearings, no votes. It's also Day 225 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy.
There's increasing indication from Republicans that they're fine with keeping that vacancy open . . . forever? We heard Sen. John McCain promise that Republicans "will be united against any Supreme Court nominee" from Hillary Clinton. Now we've got Ted Cruz kicking off his 2020 presidential campaign by reinforcing that message.
"You know, I think there will be plenty of time for debate on that issue," said Cruz, when he was asked whether a Republican-controlled Senate should hold votes on a President Hillary Clinton's nominees. "There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices. I would note, just recently, that Justice Breyer observed that the vacancy is not impacting the ability of the court to do its job. That's a debate that we are going to have."
Then he had the incredible chutzpah to put himself in the camp of "those of us who care passionately about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, who care about free speech and religious liberty and the Second Amendment." Harry Reid, in an email to members of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, named that for what it is.
"Ted Cruz and John McCain may have given away the Republican game plan on the Supreme Court," Reid wrote in the email. "And we need to treat it like the constitutional crisis it will be if Democrats don't take back the Senate majority." […]
"It would turn our Justice system and our democracy on its head," he wrote in the evening. "The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves."
Our democracy has taken quite the battering already from Republicans in the last decade. What they plan to do to a President Clinton would rock the very foundations of the country. So, no, that's no election-year hyperbole from Reid. And, yes, Democrats have to win back Congress.
Can you chip in $3 to our Senate slate? Do it for the Supreme Court.