Before the Senate voted on cloture for Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came to the floor to discuss at length the history of judicial nominations in the U.S. Senate. I was looking forward most to what he would say about Merrick Garland’s nomination.
He did address it, stating (as he often has) by saying that he and the Republican majority had applied a standard advocated previously by former Sen. Joe Biden and later Schumer himself: The Senate doesn’t have to take up the nominee of an opposing party’s president in an election year.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., quickly came to the floor to push back, accusing McConnell of not even mentioning Garland’s name. (He may not have, it didn’t even occur to me during McConnell’s speech to listen for the actual name.) “Someone must have hacked into his computer,” Durbin said, “because it wouldn’t print out the name ‘Merrick Garland.'” Durbin said the failure to move Garland’s nomination was unprecedented (which it wasn’t) and disgraceful (which it might well have been).
I believe this issue — revenge — is the most intellectually respectable argument Democrats have put forward for opposing Gorsuch. He’s obviously qualified for the job and not an extremist or a person of ill character, so revenge for Garland seems like the best justification for the minority blocking him.
But there’s another thing worth mentioning here, which I think is more important than “the Biden standard” of not taking up the nomination in an election year. Namely, the fact that Republicans picked up nine Senate seats in 2014.
Elections have consequences. Just as Barack Obama’s election in 2012 pretty much precluded the appointment of someone like Gorsuch, the Republican Senate victory meant that the opposition party had the power to blow him off. The voters gave Obama the power to defend laws he likes with his veto pen, and then they gave the power to Republicans to prevent anything in his agenda from becoming law.
The bottom line here is that it takes two to tango. The separation of powers is part of our republican system. It was up to the voters to punish Republicans for what they did to Garland, and they made their decision — who knows, perhaps that one action cost them a Senate seat in New Hampshire.
But with that behind them, and with the precedent for breaking filibusters set already by Harry Reid in 2013, the Republicans would basically be crazy not to do what they’re doing right now — to end the filibuster of nominations forever.
