Well today was uneventful.
Originally my post was inspired by recent Supreme Court decisions, but Anthony Kennedy’s sudden retirement announcement . . . well, actually, it didn’t change anything, because the basic theme is unchanged.
In light of the Supreme Court decisions handed down over the past week, most of them correctly (IMOHO) and narrowly decided, President Trump’s fanclub is crowing. Or as one Mensa candidate on Hot Air put it, “Never Trump cucks” should now realize their folly of their ways.
Indeed I have already praised President Trump’s nomination of not just Gorsuch, but a slew of other judicial candidates. That President Trump has almost totally farmed out judicial selections to the Federalist Society is a point in his favor.
Yet if we’re going to laud President Trump for putting on the Court the man who helped cast deciding votes in favorable outcomes, and as we look to Trump to nominate a Gorsuch-like candidate to replace Kennedy, we also have to give credit – maybe even more credit – to a man who is certainly no darling of the Trumpist right: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
I have hardly been a McConnell booster myself, but McConnell has stood firm on a pair of separate occasions, and those actions have enabled both Trump to be in a position to nominate Gorsuch, but also to get him and all those other nominess confirmed.
When Antonin Scalia died, Republicans could have been forgiven for doubting McConnell’s ability and resolve to refuse a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Not only did he hold the line, he did so in a fashion that signaled to Republicans that there would be no acquiescence, managing to keep his moderates in the fold all along.
Once Trump was elected, McConnell then followed former Senate leader Reid’s lead in nuking the judicial filibuster. And as a former writer for a blog called Confirm Them which advocated such a maneuver during the Bush administration, I had no issue with what Reid did, knowing that it would come to bite Democrats on the ass. And it did.
McConnell is now moving at warp speed (for the Senate) in pushing through a host of other Trump appointments. One journalist who follows the administration seems to think that this is McConnell’s main purpose in life: getting as many Trump judicial nominations through the Senate as is humanly possible.
For all his failures as majority and minority leader – real and imagined- McConnell ought to be commended for his overwhelming success in this arena.
Of course none of this solves the fundamental problem with the judiciary. That so much hangs in the balance based on a single Supreme Court Justice is deeply disturbing. This Jay Cost thread on twitter sums up the issues nicely. As he puts it in one of the tweets:
I am all in favor of institutions designed to strike down unjust or unwise laws. I just do not think that in a republic of 330 million people, it should be left to five lawyers who all hail from like 2 or 3 law schools.
While I feel confident Mitch McConnell will be able to shepherd Donald Trump’s Supreme Court selection through the Senate, my excitement is tempered by the knowledge that we have not quite grasped how to allow judicial review without the concomitant subservience to to the Judicial Branch. Be that as it may, a tip of my hat to Cocaine Mitch and his deft maneuvering.
The Cranky Conservative 