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It's getting very, very bad in the Senate. Yes, since Mitch McConnell took over as Senate Majority Leader it's been awful on top of awful, but since he set the destructive precedent of blockading a Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic President for an entire year, he is bulldozing the Senate with his noxious plan for reshaping the federal judiciary.
The Republican-led Senate confirmed Trump’s 15th appeals court nominee this week—more than the last five presidents at this juncture—with eight of the new judges in their 40s, and seven in their 50s. McConnell set the stage Thursday to confirm six more, one day after a committee voted to cut debate time, which if approved would further speed things up.
The court realignment is the product of the Senate Republican leader playing a long game by holding up then-President Barack Obama’s court nominees and then closely collaborating with Trump’s White House Counsel Don McGahn. Both men have made it a priority to advance judges ensconced in originalist legal thinking favored by the Federalist Society, which distrusts New Deal-era jurisprudence and seeks to limit the federal government’s ability to assert powers that aren’t explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.
“The judicial enterprise that has been embarked on by the president and McConnell is the most successful effort we’ve seen in the GOP in the last year and a half,” said Leonard Leo, an outside adviser to the White House on judicial selections who also serves as the Federalist Society’s executive vice president.
In addition to those 15 appeals court confirmations, McConnell's pushed through 17 to district courts. And, of course, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court—all of them in the image of Antonin Scalia, or worse. Consider Wendy Vitter, who seems to believe that birth control kills, abortion causes cancer, and that schools should not have been desegregated. In fact, four considered in committee this week—Alan D. Albright, Thomas S. Kleeh, Peter J. Phipps, and Michael J. Truncale—did not raise their hands when Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked which of them believe Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided.
Before leaving Thursday for a week-long recess, McConnell filed for cloture on six more nominees, all for appeals courts. These votes will occur soon after they return to work on May 7.
Unless Democrats figure out how to shut the whole goddamned enterprise down. It’s either that, or get ready for a whole lot of impeachments when they take back the Congress.