It should terrify voters, and it probably does, when liberals say things like what Democratic CNN commentator Bakari Sellers said Monday morning.
He said that if Republicans appoint another Supreme Court justice before Inauguration Day, “What we’ll do is very simple; we’ll add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states — that’s four new senators — we’ll add two new Supreme Court justices, and we’ll do what we should do, which is add another 70 to 100 … federal court judges.”
The only thing he left out is abolishing the filibuster for legislation in the Senate. But actual sitting Democratic senators are already saying that, so no worries. When you’re losing, you just change the rules. That’s how democracy works. Right?
This is all supposed to be a threat against Republicans to dissuade them from their moral obligation to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In reality, it should serve as a reminder of why Democrats should be kept away from Senate control and from the White House for a very long, long time.
Democrats are of course upset that one of their heroines died on Friday. No one with a conscience celebrates a death. But they’re even more upset that Republicans are within a whisper’s distance of fulfilling a decadeslong promise to bend the ideological balance of the court further for at least one generation.
I’d be mad, too.
But don’t be fooled into thinking that their threats are about retaliation. They’re not. They’re about escalation.
Sellers said with his threat that Democrats are “going to play the same game that Republicans play,” even if it means to “destroy norms and destroy the United States Senate.”
OK, except that’s not the “game” Republicans play. That’s the game Democrats play. Try as they might to erase from public memory that it was their Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take the first step in eliminating the filibuster, facts don’t simply disappear.
After Reid removed the filibuster as a factor in appointing judges and cabinet nominees, Republicans merely responded in kind by removing it for Supreme Court justices. They didn’t threaten to create new federal agencies out of whole cloth or to split red states in two so that they’d increase their majority.
What Democrats are threatening to do isn’t to play the “same game” as Republicans. They’re threatening to play the same game they’ve been playing for the past seven years, which is to abuse power and then pretend they are victims.
