Do your job. It’s a popular motto used by the New England Patriots, and now Senate Democrats have taken up the slogan to pressure Republicans into considering President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
If the GOP refuses, Democrats hope to extract a political price by damaging the re-election prospects of GOP senators running for re-election.
Democrats hoisted “Do Your Job” signs at a recent press conference and said it during Senate floor speeches directed at GOP leaders, who announced last month they will not hold hearings or votes on the person Obama taps to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
“It’s wrong, and the American people, I really do believe, won’t stand for this,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said recently. “The Senate needs to do its job.”
Democrats have maintained steady pressure on Republicans to take up the nomination. It’s been the subject of Democratic floor speeches, press conferences and social media messages in the House and Senate.
“It’s irresponsible and unprecedented to let a #SCOTUS vacancy extend into 2017,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., tweeted recently, using the acronym for the court.
Outside political groups are using the court vacancy to attack incumbent senators up for re-election, including John McCain, R-Ariz., who is running for a sixth term.
“If Sen. McCain wants to honor Scalia, he should follow the Constitution,” Senate Majority PAC tweeted with the hashtag, #DoYourJob.
The Democratic PAC created a website, gopobstructionism.com, that quotes newspapers accusing McCain and other GOP senators of obstructing the confirmation of a new justice.
Democrats are in the minority and have no control over the Senate’s official committees. But last month they staged their own hearing on the vacancy, which leaves the court essentially tied with four conservative-leaning justices and four liberal-leaning ones.
The Democrats’ witness list included constitutional scholars partial to the idea that the GOP should take up a nominee this year. One witness, Georgetown University professor Peter Edelman, said he believed Republicans were violating the Constitution by refusing to take up a nominee. He joked that the only way to get past the GOP’s refusal to take up the nomination may be sending them to “Guantanamo,” the U.S. detention center for terrorists located in Cuba.
Democrats plan to keep up the pressure on the GOP in the months ahead.
“It’s going to get rough around here,” Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., told the Washington Examiner.
Senate Democrats plan to invite the nominee to the Capitol for interviews, which puts the GOP in the awkward and unprecedented position of refusing to meet with a presidential pick for the Supreme Court who is walking the halls outside their doorways.
The Democratic tactics haven’t changed any minds among Republican lawmakers, however.
Even as Democrats were condemning Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s announcement that the Senate will not take up the nomination, McConnell privately told the GOP’s most conservative flank, the House Freedom Caucus, that there isn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” he will back down, according to a GOP aide.
Republicans say there is nothing in the Constitution that compels them to vote on a nominee or even hold hearings.
They want the next president to choose Scalia’s replacement and believe the 2016 voters should have a say in the matter.
Voters will also have a say in the makeup of the Senate, where the majority is up for grabs. Vulnerable incumbents such as Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., could be hurt by the stalled nomination. A Public Policy Poll last month found a majority of voters less likely to vote for Ayotte and Johnson because of the GOP’s refusal to take up the nomination.
“While I don’t expect Senate Republicans to reverse course, that does not mean there won’t be a price to pay,” Jim Manley, a Democratic consultant and former top aide to Reid, told the Examiner. “There will be more than a few Republicans that will have to explain why they are afraid to even have this debate, while getting Democrats to refocus on what it is at stake with the election thus driving up turn out.”
Democrats are also targeting Sen. Charles Grassley, a popular six-term Republican from Iowa.
Reid last week criticized Grassley in a Senate floor speech, quoting Iowa newspaper editorials critical of Grassley’s decision not to hold hearings on a nominee.
Grassley is running for a seventh term in November and could be hurt by the backlash to the GOP’s decision.
“He’s the first chair of this important committee to take the unprecedented step of refusing to meet, hold hearings or a vote on the president’s nominee,” Reid said. “It will not benefit him, his committee, the state of Iowa or this great country. History will never forgive this unprecedented mistake. History will never forget this misstep by Grassley.”
Grassley responded with his own floor speech, defending the GOP’s decision to wait until voters choose a new president.
Gun rights, freedom of religion and other major issues could be jeopardized by “another liberal judge on the court,” Grassley said.
“Voters deserve the right to be heard,” he added. “The American people want a reasonable justice. A person who will make the right decisions.”
