The Grim Reaper of everything good in Congress, Mitch McConnell, has donned his cloak and picked up his scythe, slathering over the news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized this week with gallbladder problems. Is there any question that the McConnell Rule established in 2016—no Supreme Court appointments for a president in an election year—would hold true for Donald Trump? Yeah. Right.
"We're going to fill" a vacancy, if there is one, said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Republican leader. "With Justice Scalia […] people might not have thought he was the one, because he wasn't the oldest at the time. You just never know." Texas Sen. John Cornyn at least acknowledged that it would be a phenomenally hypocritical thing to do, but that wouldn't stop him. "If you thought the Kavanaugh hearing was contentious this would probably be that on steroids," he told reporters. "Nevertheless, if the president makes a nomination then it's our responsibility to take it up." Only when it's a Republican president, he did not add.
Let's make it the end of this iteration of the GOP. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end McConnell's career as majority leader!
Thoughts and prayers for Ginsburg, though, all the vultures mouth: "Republicans say they wish Ginsburg a swift recovery and have no inside knowledge of a retirement but are prepared to move if a vacancy presents itself." There's nobody left on the court McConnell can con into retiring that gains him anything, with Chief Justice John Roberts being the only potentially not rock-solid Trumper in the conservative majority. Trying to pry him out would probably be too much even for Moscow Mitch.
But what about that hypocrisy? Are they even going to try to answer the charge that what they did to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee in 2016, will look even more unprincipled if they go expressly against the doctrine McConnell established then? Of course they're not. "McConnell and his allies argue the situation is different because Republicans control both the White House and the Senate."
That sound you hear is moving goalposts, and the last shred of McConnell's soul evaporating. Sen. Susan Collins apparently wasn't around to express her concern over such a possibility, but Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, who did vote against Kavanaugh, went so far as to suggest she's not entirely comfortable with all this talk. "You're coming pretty close, though, to the presidential election," she said. "That is something that you factor into these discussions about how we move forward."