Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will not be meeting with Amy Coney Barrett, he reiterated in a Tuesday morning tweet. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley has no intention to do so either, according to Politico. “I personally have no desire to pretend it’s acceptable,” Merkley said of the supposedly “illegitimate” nomination. Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey also won’t meet with Barrett.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal called it all “illegitimate,” too. He won’t be meeting with Barrett. Sen. Mazie Hirono, another member of the committee, won’t be meeting with her, either.
On its face, the main objection is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to move forward with Barrett’s nomination, considering what he did four years ago when President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the high court. There are, however, deeper and much more profound objections to the “democratic illegitimacy” of the institutions involved in all this, and Democrats are feeding that hungry beast.
The Barrett nomination has reignited a fire under liberals that rages most stridently when they are taking on losses. “This tyranny of the minority” is how Fox News analyst Juan Williams referred to current Supreme Court politics. “If Trump fills the Ginsburg seat, fully one-third of the Court will be controlled by judges with no democratic legitimacy,” Vox’s Ian Millhiser writes, referring to Trump’s losing the popular vote in 2016.
Another Vox writer makes a sort of concession that could be seen as justifying McConnell’s current play but finds it’s all just not fair. “Every electoral system has its quirks, and elected officials are entitled to throw some elbows if they think it’s important,” Matthew Yglesias writes. “But McConnell’s hardball isn’t a fair game — his ideas don’t need to be popular to win, and his unfair advantage in one arena extends its power into other arenas.”
Of course, McConnell’s ideas, and his party’s, do need to be popular to win, and they were popular enough to win a majority in 2014 and to maintain it until now. If they aren’t as popular anymore, he and the Republicans will lose seats and perhaps their majority in November. Republican ideas weren’t popular enough to maintain a majority in the 110th Congress, nor were Republicans able to win a majority in the 111th, 112th, or 113th Congresses. There was nothing unfair about that.
What perhaps is unfair is the Republicans’ stroke of political fortune, but how does an opposing party mount an attack against that? Instead, it’s “the system” that’s unfair. Let it be remembered that for the last six years, Republicans have happened to control at least one of the two levers of government responsible for putting people on the Supreme Court, whereas between 2008 and 2014, the Democrats controlled both. They filled two Supreme Court vacancies during that six-year period, and Republicans are going to try and fill three. Having the constitutional power is as much a prerogative as they need to put their favored jurists on the courts.
