It's Wednesday, October 26, and Day 255 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 224 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy.
Today were get the lamest of all the lame-ass excuses for not confirming a Supreme Court nominee, courtesy Chuck Grassley. The master of the lame-ass.
Speaking last week to the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, a leading newspaper in his home state, the senator suggested that holding a confirmation hearing for Garland would not be the fiscally conservative thing to do.
“My staff tells me that’s about a half a million to $750,000 to hire people to maybe work for three or four months to do it,” Grassley told the editorial board, which wrote in May that history won’t remember the senator kindly for blockading Obama’s nominee.
In the hourlong sit-down with the paper, Grassley said that not holding a hearing due to its potential cost was simply “a tradition” he might follow because of “how deep you have to go in to go through a person’s record in order to hold a hearing that’s worthwhile.”
“So when 52 senators say they’re not going to take it up,” he said, referring to his Senate colleagues’ opposition to Garland, “should I spend that money and have a hearing?”
Number one: what the actual fuck? Supreme Court justices and whether or not we go to war are pretty much the most important thing we've got a Senate for. And as Judiciary Committee chairman, it's pretty much Grassley's number one job. There isn't any spending limit imposed on that by the constitution. Because the idea that there would be is total bullshit. This. Is. Not. A. Reason.
Number two: 52 senators are breaking their oath of office and that's not an excuse either. But it's a very good reason for a Democratic majority to nuke the filibuster on Supreme Court justices.
Number three: we need a Democratic majority in the Senate to do just that, and to make sure that the Supreme Court functions again. Because the writing for President Clinton is already on the wall: they investigate, they impeach, and the Republican Senate has their excuse for blockading her nominees—they could never accept a nominee from a president under a cloud.
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