It's Tuesday, November 1, and Day 261 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 230 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy.
And of course, seven days until an election which will decide the fate of the Supreme Court in a number of ways: will Donald Trump be naming new justices as president? Will we have a Senate that will allow a President Hillary Clinton to appoint justices? If the Republicans retain control of the Senate, that's going to be a real question.
We know that because of Sen. Richard Burr, who not only thinks it's funny to go around in private talking about using pictures of Hillary Clinton for target practice. He is also making a campaign pledge to keep her from having a Supreme Court nominee.
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., told Republican supporters Saturday he would try to keep a vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court empty for four years if Hillary Clinton is elected president, a shift from his position in February. […]
But in Saturday's meeting in Mooresville, Burr said, "If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that four years from now we've still got an opening on the Supreme Court."
Burr told supporters that an eight-member court would mean some rulings by lower courts like the one Garland sits on would stand as is, "But I think on the things that are important to the country, there's a better chance that the lower court or the appellate court will get the right answer before it gets to the Supreme Court."
Presumably, if we lose another justice in those four years, Burr would make sure that those vacancies were also left open. Because, hey, we've got other courts, right? It's just the Supreme Court that would be crippled. What's so important that it could wait four, eight years to be decided?
That puts Burr in with Ted Cruz and John McCain, and it's enough to show that it's an actual Republican strategy now, one that threatens our nation's legitimacy. After all, the Constitution is really just a piece of parchment. The system that's been crafted out of it in the past two centuries works as long as the norms and traditions that have been established are held to. When party comes before country—as it has for Republicans since at least the first Clinton presidency—our republic is being held together by the slimmest of threads.
Senators doing their constitutional duty is one of those threads. And it's going to take a Democratic Senate to preserve it.
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