Tim Kaine, currently a U.S. senator and probably soon to be vice president, has a promise for Republicans: if they refuse to cooperate in appointing Supreme Court justices, the Democrats will nuke the filibuster on the SCOTUS.
“I was in the Senate when the Republicans’ stonewalling around appointments caused Senate Democratic majority to switch the vote threshold on appointments from 60 to 51. And we did it on everything but a Supreme Court justice,” Kaine said. “If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies, then a Democratic Senate majority will say, ‘We’re not going to let you thwart the law.’”
Democrats, Kaine ultimately predicted, “will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
That reinforces what outgoing Democratic leader Harry Reid has said. They're responding to the outrageous claims by Republicans John McCain and Ted Cruz, bolstered by conservative "legal scholars,” that they can just let Supreme Court justices die off, without replacing them, in order to deny Hillary Clinton a nominee.
There are other ways beyond blocking floor votes that the Republican majority has used to prevent nominations from going through in the Obama administration. They've done everything from refusing to work with the White House to find candidates to fill vacancies to refusing to clear the nominees they themselves put forward to have hearings. They've stopped having hearings and they've refused to send nominees approved through the committee on to the floor. Many who've been cleared for floor votes just aren't getting them because the Majority Leader—Mitch McConnell—can just decide not to have the votes.
And when they were in the minority, they could filibuster any nominees who did come to the floor, refusing to give the necessary 60-vote margin for confirmation, even if they had no valid reason to do so. When they still had the majority in 2013, Democrats changed the rules for all nominees—except to the Supreme Court—to require a simple majority to confirm. What Harry Reid and Tim Kaine are saying now is that they've done it once, and they'll do it again.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is expected to become the new Democratic leader next year, has yet to weigh in. He's not going to have much choice, though, if Democrats take the majority and Clinton the White House. It's nuke the filibuster or have a crippled Supreme Court. Even Schumer would probably put the Supreme Court over his own self-preservation. Probably.
But first, Democrats have to win the Senate.
Can you pitch in $1 today to each of our Democratic challengers to give him that majority?