Every bloody horrendous thing this nation is experiencing right now represents a crisis in unrepresentative democracy, and the potential confirmation of a second Supreme Court justice by Donald Trump is no exception.
Not only did Trump lose the popular vote by nearly three million votes, but the Senate that is supposed to "advise and consent" on his nominee on behalf of the America were also unpopularly elected, writes the Washington Post's Paul Waldman:
Using Dave Leip’s invaluable election atlas, I added up all the votes cast for Democrats and Republicans in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 Senate elections, which put the current Senate in place. I didn’t bother with the few special elections since 2012, which in total wouldn’t change the results much, but I did include Bernie Sanders’s and Angus King’s last elections, since they are nominally independent but caucus with the Democrats. Here are the results:
Republican votes: 102.3 million
Democratic votes: 117.4 million
That's right, 15 million more Americans cast votes for Democrats in a Senate that is now controlled by a 51-to-49 GOP majority. As Waldman points out, that's because every state gets two Senators, making the votes of Wyoming's 580,000 residents hold just as much sway as those cast by California's 40 million residents.
As many pundits have pointed out: If Kavanaugh is confirmed, five of the sitting justices will have been appointed by Republican presidents even though Democratic presidential candidates won the most votes in six of the past seven presidential races: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton.
George W. Bush got two appointments that would have gone to Gore if the Supreme Court hadn't handed him the election. And now Donald Trump is getting at least two appointments out of an election in which the electoral college turned for Trump on the slimmest of margins—less than 80,000 votes in three states—while he got pummeled in the popular vote by an historic margin of millions. On top of that, the unpopularly installed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell robbed Barack Obama of a seat that was constitutionally his to fill.
Even if you toss out Gore's potential contribution and just focus on the unpopularly elected GOP Senate stealing Obama’s seat, the high court would have had a 5-4 progressive majority heading into the current presidency. And if the popularly elected Hillary Clinton were president today, she would be looking at cementing a 6-3 liberal majority with her next pick. Who knows, maybe Justice Anthony Kennedy wouldn't have retired had Hillary become president. Regardless, the Supreme Court would be safely leaning left right now, as are the majority of the nation’s voters.