Rarely has the United States been so neatly split as it is now. One party holds complete control of Congress while the other holds the presidency–a scenario that has happened only a quarter of the time since 1855.
In 2012, Barack Obama won 51 percent of the national vote. In the 2014 midterm elections, House Republicans captured 52 percent. The result has been a Newtonian moment: For every White House statement, there is an equal and opposite press release from the congressional GOP.
These numbers are enough to demonstrate the country’s close and rigid partisan divide. But the fissure spreads even further. The Supreme Court, an institution supposedly insulated from politics, has now become a proxy for the balance between the Democratic and Republican parties. With the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, there are now four Democratic-appointed judges and four Republican-appointed judges on the high bench. While some jurists tapped by a president of one party practice a judicial philosophy resembling the politics of the other — David Souter, a choice of George H.W. Bush, comes to mind — the eight current justices are roughly an equal mix of left and right. The Court is divided. Scalia’s replacement will be responsible for giving directions.
Naturally, Democrats and Republicans have assumed attack formation. The former expect the president to name a successor and insist that the Senate “fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote,” Obama said. Most of the latter have agreed upon a gist: The next president ought to decide, and the voters should choose which person they trust most to make that decision.
Pollsters have turned it over to such people for their thoughts. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked 800 registered voters this week how they thought elected officials should handle the task of filling the Supreme Court vacancy. 43 percent said the Senate should vote this year on a nominee. 42 percent said it should table the matter and wait for the next president. Those numbers don’t just apply to the entire sample — they’re identical to the responses of those who identified as independents.
The judges have scored this one a draw.
Representatives of the two firms that conduct the NBC/WSJ survey, Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, noted to THE WEEKLY STANDARD how quickly partisans have lined up on this issue — and how it’s reflective of the country’s mood.
“The president’s job rating, the generic preference for a Democrat or a Republican in the presidential race — I think this is very consistent with what we’re seeing in other aspects that we measure,” Hart Research senior vice president Jeff Horwitt told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
CBS News performed a similar survey in the last week, this one of about 2,000 adults selected at random. Its findings mirrored those of the NBC/WSJ result: 47 percent said Obama should appoint the ninth Supreme Court justice and 46 percent said it should be the duty of the next president.
And after nearly a decade of political fracturing, we could have expected such a clean break.
