In 2013, majority Senate Democrats decided to abolish the Senate minority’s right to filibuster most presidential nominations, but not for Supreme Court.
In so doing, they opened the can of worms that they are now being forced to eat, one by one, as punishment.
Democrats neutered themselves with their actions in 2013. They not only guaranteed that someday a Republican president’s nominations would be rammed through the same way, but they also begged to have their precedent expanded. Before the recent presidential election, which they fully expected to win, Democrats openly bragged about their plans to abuse the same power again and ram through new President Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court justices.
So unlike in 2005, when Senate Republicans resisted the urge to run roughshod over the minority party’s rights, they don’t have to wonder whether Democrats would abuse power in the same situation. They did abuse it. In fact, they promised to abuse it again if they had won in November.
Today, the Senate minority’s rights are as good as dead. In a world where the nuclear option had never been invoked, we would be talking today about the need for President Trump to nominate confirmable Cabinet secretaries and now a confirmable Supreme Court justice. That’s barely a consideration now. Instead, Democrats are now fighting over whether they should just back down in their fight against Trump’s first Supreme Court pick tonight, or show token resistance and be broken.
They fear that if they resist Antonin Scalia’s replacement and Republicans invoke the nuclear option to confirm him or her, they will be weaker when Trump makes a second Supreme Court pick that will be more consequential, shifting the court’s ideological balance.
If the filibuster against Supreme Court nominees is already dead and gone by the time that battle happens, then the Left’s last finger-hold on American law could vanish with hardly anyone noticing. CNN reports:
Republicans are considering gutting the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if Democrats stay largely united and block Trump’s first pick. By employing the so-called “nuclear option,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could move to reduce the threshold for clearing a filibuster from 60 votes to 51 votes.
That would mean Democrats could lose leverage in the next Supreme Court fight if Trump were to replace a more liberal justice, since the GOP now has 52 seats in the Senate.
Preserving the filibuster now could give Democrats more leverage in the future, proponents of this strategy say. But it would enrage the Democratic base that wants a furious Democratic response to Trump’s court pick.
That’s what they say, but they’re wasting their time worrying about losing what had already been lost. No one even knows for sure that Trump will even get a second Supreme Court pick. But assuming he does, Democrats’ deference to first nominee won’t make them any stronger the second time around. If they resist, they will lose when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., invokes the nuclear option, exactly as the Democrats themselves announced they would do before their shocking, spectacular loss.
