Under the headline “Gorsuch battle brings Senate to brink of a new low,” Politico has this morning published a piece by Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim about the state of the Senate’s bipartisanship—that state being virtually nonexistent. Cooperation, they write, has gone out the window, and there is no hint that it will be returning anytime soon. They talked with “centrist-minded senators from both parties” to hear most of them lament the situation.
Once, not so long ago, the threat of the loss of the 180-year-old filibuster would have sparked across-the-aisle efforts to maintain the procedure. In fact, that has happened more than once. Not this time.
Which means if the Democrats succeed in mounting a filibuster to keep the extremist Neil Gorsuch off the Supreme Court, the Republicans will nuke it, hold a second vote to confirm Gorsuch, and the Senate will subsequently operate in the majoritarian manner of the House of Representatives.
Some have argued that the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees should not be used now, but preserved for future use against a nomination of someone more extreme than Gorsuch. Keep your powder dry, uh-huh. This tactic presumes that “emergency” use of the filibuster wouldn’t also get it nuked. Preserving the filibuster for some mythical future use actually means mummifying it and putting it in a sealed jar on a Senate shelf, visible but untouchable.
Demolishing the filibuster, however is just a symptom. Everett and Kim write:
Unlike past institutional crises, there’s no bipartisan “gang” stepping up to force a truce between the warring armies led by Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Acrimony between the two parties has become so routine that invoking the so-called nuclear option to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court is almost a ho-hum affair, assumed to be a done deal.
“The Senate has changed,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who’s fought rules changes in the past. “You can’t do what we used to do, what I did in the past. There’s too much ill will.” [...]
Good grief. The senator sounds like a naive backbencher. In fact, it’s not naive, it’s BS.
Did McCain stand up publicly to Mitch McConnell last March when the majority leader chose not to even give Merrick Garland a confirmation hearing based on a rogue interpretation of who is president during a president’s last year in office? Here’s McCain not taking McConnell to task:
“This issue is not about any single nominee – it’s about the integrity of the Court. With less than a year left in a lame-duck presidency and the long-term ideological balance of the Supreme Court at stake, I believe the American people must have a voice in the direction of the Supreme Court by electing a new president. The last time the American people spoke, they elected a Republican majority to the Senate to act as a ‘check and balance’ on President Obama’s liberal agenda – a responsibility I cannot ignore. We must allow the people to play a role in selecting the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.”
Good ol’ interparty cooperation.
And then there was McCain in the pre-election vanguard of Republicans last October saying the party would sandbag any Supreme Court nominations made by Hillary Clinton if she were to win the presidency. "I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” McCain declared. He later walked that back a half a baby-step. Ahhhh, bipartisanship.
In 2009, did McCain step up and rip McConnell a new one when the then-minority leader with a cabal of other Senate Republicans rallied their colleagues to refuse to cooperate one iota with Barack Obama—this done even before he took the oath of office? Did McCain—throwing around his seniority clout—tell McConnell as the message not to cooperate was spread, “no, don’t do that, give bipartianship, Senate comity and the new president a chance”? Not on your life.
Ill will did not arrive in the Senate on a puff of stray wind. Its genesis was not spontaneous. The GOP’s record of scorched-earth politics and its eight-year-long opposition to everything on Obama’s agenda was the catalyst.
McCain’s act long ago grew tedious. And now it’s just pathetic.
The cavalier, disrespectful, unconstitutional treatment of Judge Garland ought to be enough motivation for every Democrat to join the filibuster that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed. But for those Democrats in the Senate and the party rank-and-file who think tit-for-tat is playground behavior, Paul Waldman at The Washington Post laid it out perfectly a week ago in his column “Democrats are going to filibuster Gorsuch. It’s the right thing to do”:
Now for some straight talk: Everyone knows who Neil Gorsuch is and what kind of justice he’ll be. Democrats have tried to get him to admit it, knowing that he never will, while he pretends to have an open mind on everything and a judicial philosophy unsullied by any particular normative beliefs about policy. It’s an act, and it’s one that Republican nominees in particular have honed over the years: Claim you can’t say anything about past cases or present cases or future cases, and even if you could, you really have no opinions about anything. Or maybe you have a stray opinion here or there, but those opinions lay upon your conscience with all the weight of a few downy feathers, easily brushed aside when it comes time to apply the law and the Constitution.
It’s utterly dishonest, and everyone knows it. Gorsuch was presented to Trump as a possible nominee by the Heritage Foundation; he was on its list not because he’s keen of mind and pure of heart, but because he’s a staunch conservative who, above all, could be counted on to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. The lie that he and all his supporters tell is that every case has one true and objective outcome that you can reach if only you put aside crass ideology and allow yourself to be guided by the light of the Constitution’s wisdom. No one who knows anything about the law could believe that, no matter how often it gets repeated.