Democrats are threatening to expand the Supreme Court. Good.
With an election three months away in which Republicans very well may lose the White House and Senate — even as the 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is battling cancer yet again — the question has arisen anew: What if a Supreme Court seat becomes open between now and the election?
Or even more pointedly, what if a vacancy occurs after an election Republicans lose, but before the new Democratic Senate and president take office? Would Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ram through another conservative justice as a last grab at right-wing judicial supremacy?
In May 2019, McConnell was asked what he would do if a seat became open in the last year of President Trump’s term. “We’d fill it,” he said with a smirk, surprising no one. The reason people in the room laughed knowingly was that when Republicans refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill a vacant seat in 2016, they claimed to be following a new principle, that no president should fill a seat in the final year of a term.
In a career of cynical manipulation and disingenuous rhetoric, it was a high point for McConnell; he himself has bragged many times that stymieing Merrick Garland’s nomination “was the most consequential decision I’ve ever made in my entire public career.” That McConnell did it while claiming he was following a “rule” that ought to apply equally to Democratic and Republican presidencies was icing on the cake, not in spite of but because everyone knew he and Republicans who followed his lead were lying through their grinning teeth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/03/democrats-are-threatening-expand-supreme-court-good/
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