Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell engineered a crisis in the federal judiciary by working in both the minority and majority to block as many of President Barack Obama's nominees as humanly possible. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, he'd have done exactly the same thing, because reshaping the federal judiciary on behalf of right-wing extremists is apparently the legacy he craves. But Clinton wasn't elected, thanks in part to the intervention of a foreign adversary, a fact McConnell worked effectively to suppress during the election.
Even with Donald Trump as the nominee and potential president, a man so clearly dangerous to the nation by his ignorance, his narcissism, and his corruption, McConnell was intent on handing the federal judiciary over to the next Republican president, and did. The damage now being wrought will reverberate for generations to come. The Senate is on verge of confirming another three judges, ages 37, 40 and 46, to what could be lifetime appointments.
All three are ideologues. The youngest is Allison Jones Rushing who proved her extremist chops worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian organization that has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. She is also woefully ill-qualifed having next to no actual court experience. "[This week's nominees] may lack life experience and will be serving many years after Trump … enjoying life tenure on the 'Supreme Courts' for their regions because the Supreme Court hears so few cases," Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and an expert in judicial nominations told HuffPost's Jennifer Bendery. "Many are also being confirmed on extremely close votes and some on party-line votes with insufficiently rigorous vetting."
About that vetting: Rush's Judiciary Committee hearing and committee confirmation was conducted during a Senate recess last fall, with no Democratic members present because it the Senate wasn't in session. That's not vetting, it's not even a hearing. It's a charade.
It's only a part of the total breakdown of the Senate's advise and consent responsibility overseen by McConnell. The committee is even ignoring the opposition of home-state senators to nominees, the blue slip tradition. McConnell and the Republicans have "eviscerated nearly all Senate rules and customs, such as consultation and blue slips, that protect the minority party’s prerogatives in the nomination and confirmation processes," Tobias says. And that is "Not healthy for the judiciary or the nation."
There's very little Democrats can do about it at this point, other than retake the majority. McConnell will respond to every attempt by Democrats to use procedure to slow down the onslaught of confirmations by just plowing over them. But when Democrats do take the majority, hopefully by ousting McConnell in 2020, they're going to have to be as creative and as ruthless as he's been in order to restore the third branch.