Let’s consider how long each of the nine most recent SCOTUS nominations has taken, from date of official nomination to confirmation:
- Kavanaugh: 88 days
- Gorsuch: 65 days
- Kagan: 87 days
- Sotomayor: 66 days
- Alito: 82 days
- Roberts: 62 days (counting both his nominations)
- Breyer: 73 days
- Ginsburg: 50 days
- Thomas: 99 days
In general the process takes at least two months but rarely more than three. The problem with RBG’s potential replacement is that between this Saturday, when trump is expected to announce his nomination, and the seating of the next Congress on January 3, 2021, is 99 days. There is no question that Moscow Mitch would use every tool at his disposal to push the nomination through, even if it meant having the Senate be in session on Christmas Eve. So let’s not kid ourselves that 99 days is more than enough time.
What, then, is there for Congressional Democrats to do? Surely there must be something?
Nancy Pelosi may be onto something when she raised the possibility of using impeachment as a stalling tactic. When trump was impeached earlier in the year, the Senate received the articles of impeachment on January 15, and they acquitted him on February 5 — 21 days later.
Twenty-one days. We need 99, minus whatever time Moscow Mitch would rush through the nominee. That would still give him room to maneuver.
So that’s it, then, right? This battle, too, is lost?
No. Not yet.
I am reminded of my days of playing Civilization IV, a turn-based strategy game where you create and expand an empire, conquering other civilizations if you like while fending off their attempts to return the favor. There were several routes to victory, including a space race victory, where you built a giant ship and launched it to Alpha Centauri. Pursuing this route often meant foregoing building up your military, whose technology was highly advanced by this stage of the game, but it also meant avoiding potentially expensive wars.
AI opponents, however, would sometimes use this same time period to go for cultural victories: having three of their cities achieve “legendary” culture status. More than once the AI snatched defeat from my jaws of victory when I didn’t keep an eye on their culture status or didn’t do anything about it. But remember what I said about wars’ being potentially expensive? How was I to stop them?
Spy spam!
This was the name I gave to the tactic of training spies in every one of my cities that wasn’t working on the spaceship, routing them to the enemy city that was attempting to be the AI’s third and final legendary city, and sabotaging that city one turn at a time. If I could fund enough espionage and train enough spies so that at one sabotage mission would succeed per turn, turn after turn, more than the enemy could stop, I could pull this ruse off.
It certainly wasn’t sustainable in the long run. It wasn’t even normally something you wanted to do unless you wanted to provoke an enemy into declaring war on you (and there were far better ways of doing that). But when you had nothing further to lose and everything to gain, suddenly this tactic became well worth it.
Think of that cultural victory as a trump SCOTUS confirmation, the enemy city as his nominee, and the “spy spam” as repeated impeachments.
That’s right, impeach him over and over and over again. Quickly. Anything that is impeachment-worthy counts. Anything. If only there was one or two...thousand or so things for which he deserved impeachment!
And don’t stop there. How about a little impeachment for trump’s fixer, William Barr? Maybe Jared Kushner and his ties to Saudi Arabia deserve some looking into as well? The rest of the Trump crime family? The US postmaster general for his deliberate sabotage of the postal service? The list goes on.
The key is, like the spy spam, to get the impeachments into the Senate faster than they can dispense of them. This will require a herculean effort the likes of which will be unprecedented. One or two committees cannot be expected to shoulder this weight alone. The more House committees we have working on separate cases, the better. Speed is everything. It doesn’t even matter at this point whether a particular charge is an airtight case. It just matters that you can get as many of them to the Senate in as little time as possible.
In the Senate, the opposite tactic is needed. Over there, time becomes your greatest weapon, so use it. Stall the transition of the articles of impeachment, as Pelosi did in trump’s first impeachment. Propose a ton of resolutions, anything superfluous will do. Hell, bring out the cots onto the Senate floor if you have to. Just be sure to wear masks and socially distance!
As a bonus, this allows Democrats to control the message going into the election and remind the people of what a horrible president trump is. That thin-skinned man cannot deal with any kind of criticism or pushback against him, so this will rattle him and throw him off his game.
Remember the goal: Clog up the Senate until, hopefully, reinforcements arrive in January, maybe even one of them (Mark Kelly) on November 30. Get us to that mark with time to spare. Yes this depends on the chance that we actually take the Senate, but we’ve got to take that chance. As Gene Kranz said in Apollo 13: