Will Only The Party That Controls The Senate Get Its SCOTUS Nominees Confirmed From Now On?

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

We HAVE TO win the Senate Nov. 3.

HAVE TO.

Because if we don't, does anyone really believe that in 2021-2022 Mitch McConnell will allow his "greatest" legacy, a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS majority, to be shifted back to 5-4 if, say, Clarence Thomas dies?

He will not. McConnell knows now that merrickgarlanding works.

He knows that it can work INDEFINITELY.

In 2016 when everyone expected Hillary to be the next president, Republicans were already talking about stonewalling against any and all of her Supreme Court appointees throughout her entire presidency.

Once Joe Biden is president, a conservative SCOTUS seat could come open February 2021 and if McConnell is still majority leader he WILL merrickgarland Biden's nominee for two straight years. He will refuse to act for four years if he can hold control of the Senate in the 2022 midterms, too.

I strongly suspect McConnell wouldn't even allow Biden to fill a seat vacated by another liberal justice either, regardless of when it occurs in a Biden 1st term. I believe McConnell would merrickgarland that seat, too. McConnell would relish having a 6-2 Supreme Court. He'd very likely refuse to act on that Democratic nominee, too, and hope that, say, a Nikki Haley will be able to defeat Kamala Harris in 2024.

I call this undermining of the Constitution through this outrageous abuse of Senate power "McConnellism," and suspected it was a new era we were already in in 2016.

September 2020's sad events have only increased my fear that this already is the situation, that it already is our new national reality. That NO Republican Senate is going to confirm ANY Democratic president's SCOTUS nominee ever again.

If we win the White House but fail to win the Senate in November, and this proves to be the case, of course it will force all future Democratic senate majority leaders to respond in kind, and merrickgarland ALL SCOTUS nominees made by all Republican presidents.

McConnellism, if it's what we've already been debased into, is another huge step down the path of the intentional corruption and sabotage of American government by the 21st Century Republican Party.

So, again:

We MUST win the Senate back this year.

[frazzled]

1. Yes

And it’s partly our fault. We’re the ones who got rid of the filibuster in the SCOTUS process, in order to get Obama’s two nominations through.

[TheRealNorth]

4. Wrong

Harry Reid did not get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. We got rid of it for lower level Federal Judgeships after Moscow Mitch was blocking those nominees, just like he blocked Merrick Garland.

Either way, it would not have mattered because if Democrats had done the same when they were in the minority, Moscow Mitch would have invoked the nuclear option as Republicans had threatened to do numerous times since the 2000's. Had Harry Reid not done what he did, there would be even more conservative judges on the Federal Bench.

[frazzled]

5. Okay

Misremembered. We did it for lower courts then McConnell retaliated for Gorsuch.

We could change back if we get the majority. But I’m getting tired of yo-yo politics. It doesn’t end well.

[beachbumbob]

2. I can live with that, GOP is likely powerless for years

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

10. Would but it were so. We said that in 2008, too.

I've abridged the below... left out Silver's tables; edited; condensed some content. See the whole article. It's worth the time.


Senate’s Rural Skew
Makes It Very Hard For Democrats
To Win The Supreme Court

9/20/2020 fivethirtyeight.com by Nate Silver

I don’t have a particularly strong take on how the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg will affect either the presidential election or the race for control of the U.S. Senate. And I’d encourage you to avoid putting too much stock in anybody else’s take for now, too. The very earliest indication is that President Trump’s desire to move full-speed ahead toward naming Ginsburg’s replacement could be unpopular, but that’s based on only one poll.

But here’s what I do know: the Senate is an enormous problem for Democrats given the current political coalitions, in which Democrats are dominant in cities while Republicans triumph in rural areas. And because the Senate is responsible for confirming Supreme Court picks, that means the Supreme Court is a huge problem for Democrats too.

Sure, Democrats might win back the Senate this year — indeed, they were slight favorites to do so before the Ginsburg news. But in the long run, they’re likely to lose it more often than not.

You can probably grasp intuitively that a legislative body which provides as much representation to Wyoming (population: 580,000) as California (population: 39.5 million) will tend to favor rural areas. But it’s a bigger effect than you might realize, so let’s run some numbers.

[See full article.]
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/

...The Senate has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation, even though there are about an equal number of voters in each.

This has all sorts of other downstream consequences. Since rural areas tend to be whiter, it means the Senate represents a whiter population than the nation actually is.

... It also means that the median states — the ones that would be decisive in the event of a 50-50 tie in the Senate — are considerably redder than the country as a whole.

Thr Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole.

This means that Democrats are likely to win it only in the event of a near-landslide in their favor nationally. That’s likely to make the Republican majority on the Supreme Court pretty durable.

To negate their disadvantage in the Senate what the Democrats really need to do is to find some small-population states that move toward them. Other than Nevada, they haven’t really had any of these recently. Montana and Alaska are probably the least-implausible candidates, although Montana’s presidential voting has actually been getting redder.

Democrats could also consider adding states to the union. If D.C. and Puerto Rico joined, and California were split into three states that ranged from Democratic-leaning to solidly blue, it would reduce the Senate's Republican lean from 6.6 points down to 2.5 points.

But that also illustrates how robust the Republicans’ advantage is. You could add four Democratic states (D.C., Puerto Rico, California/A and California/B) and the Senate would still have a slight Republican tilt.
...

[TeamPooka]

3. yup

[enough]

6. No. Only if the party controlling the Senate is Republican.

The Democrats will play by the old rules. Eventually only Republicans will be on the Supreme Court.

[pecosbob]

7. Each Congress makes it's own rules, filibusters included

If one Congress abolishes the filibuster during that session it has no effect whatsoever on succeeding legislatures. What is broken is the set of 'gentlemen's rules' for day to day governance. We all can see clearly by this time that the GOP has utter contempt for playing by any set of rules. Fear of upsetting standards of civility is utter bullshit when faced with the GOP's attempts to secure tyrannical minority rule in this country for the coming decades.

[tritsofme]

9. The Senate is a continuing body, it does not adopt new rules every two years.

They continue unless explicitly changed.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Hell, the NEW "McConnell Rule," if Joe Biden wins and a vacancy opens up

in February, 2021 will be "Democrats don't get to seat USSC Justices. Period. Get over it."

[Klaralven]

11. Democrats have controlled both the Senate and the Presidency in only 8 of the last 40 years

Republicans have controlled both the Senate and the Presidency in 16 of the last 40 years

For 8 years there has been a Republican President and a Democratic Senate.

For 8 years there has been a Democratic President and a Republican Senate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

12. Right. Those would have been, under McConnellism, the only windows of time

...any SCOTUS vacancies could be filled at all. In just 24 out of the last 40 years. The rest of the time, the court would just operate with fewer justices.

And as you point out, the R's would have had twice as many of those years in which they could seat justices, compared to us. 16 years, to our 8 years.