It's Monday, September 26, and Day 225 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 194 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy. Days until the government runs out of funding: 4.5.
So what's the Senate doing today? Not a lot. At least, not much publicly. They're working behind the scenes, one would hope, to resolve McConnell's Flint hostage situation.
Meanwhile, The New York Times is musing about what this election means for Chief Justice John Roberts.
Were a liberal to replace Justice Scalia—whether it was President Obama’s pick, Judge Merrick B. Garland, or someone named by Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency—a majority of the justices would be Democratic appointees for the first time in almost 50 years. That would open a new chapter at the court, and leave Chief Justice Roberts, a Republican appointee with a generally conservative voting record, in the minority in many closely divided cases. And it could force him to choose between becoming a marginal figure or concluding that a new era on his court requires a new kind of leadership—and a move to the left.
“It’s been a long time since there was a chief justice who was in dissent across a wide range of important issues,” said Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford. […]
That notion cannot cheer Chief Justice Roberts, Professor Karlan said. “On a court with five liberals, the chief justice faces the prospect of assigning cases involving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Bankruptcy Act,” she said, “while Justice Ginsburg assigns the cases that make the front page of The Times.”
Professor Strauss said Chief Justice Roberts would not tolerate that sort of irrelevance. “I don’t think this chief justice will accept being in a permanent minority on the court,” he said.
It's an interesting thought exercise missing just one thing: the political context of the first total blockade of a president's Supreme Court nominee. Seems like that might warrant even a mention. But I guess we've "normalized" to the point where this just isn’t much of a thing.
Can you chip in $3 today to help turn the Senate blue?
43 days remain until the election. Click here to make sure you're registered to vote. And while you're at it, make sure your family and friends are registered too.