After decades of bringing a plastic toy bat to a gunfight, the GOP – that party with an uncanny record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory – finally grew a spine and “went nuclear” on the confirmation process for Judge Neil Gorsuch.
It’s about time!
The result is that Gorsuch will be taking his rightful place on the bench at the U.S. Supreme Court.
We’ve all heard the incessant bleating from the left. “It’s a stolen seat! It should be Merrick Garland’s! Senate rules! Tradition!” Blah, blah, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
I, for one, couldn’t care less about their whining. In fact, in all honesty, I’m absolutely reveling in it! Because the time finally came when they had to pay the piper, and they didn’t like it one little bit. They’re squealing like stuck pigs. Good!
For decades, for purely political purposes, they changed rules and moved the goalposts at will. They counted on the GOP to consider themselves to be above such “petty” political games when they were themselves in power, and for the most part they’ve been right … up to now.
The GOP was indeed stupid enough to keep letting them get away with it while refusing to resort to the same tactics themselves.
This kind of cynical, manipulative behavior goes all the way back to FDR, who threatened to “pack” the Supreme Court with like-minded leftist judges who’d back his socialist programs, and when the GOP legislators chickened out and backed off, the stage was set.
When Reagan nominated to SCOTUS Robert Bork, a superbly qualified originalist jurist, the scurrilous attacks on his character, ironically led by Ted Kennedy – the “Lion of the Senate,” who was apparently taking a break from molesting and drowning young interns at the time – were so outrageous that Bork ended up withdrawing from consideration.
The episode was so shameful it even led to coining of the term “borking” for subjecting nominees to irrational and unreasonable political attacks.
When Bush I nominated Clarence Thomas to SCOTUS, Senate Dems tried, unsuccessfully, to “bork” him with the infamous Anita Hill slander.
When Bush II nominated Samuel Alito, Senate Dems tried unsuccessfully to filibuster his appointment. They did successfully block Bush II’s nominee to the D.C. Circuit Miguel Estrada using a filibuster.
Yet when the shoe has been on the other foot Democratic nominees have sailed through to an easy confirmation in spite of their political bent, with little to no GOP opposition, die-hard doctrinaire leftist Ruth Bader Ginsburg being a classic example.
A Carter appointment, she was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 96 to 3. Breyer was confirmed 87 to 9; Kagan by 63 to 37; and Sotomayor by 67 to 29.
When Bush I was president then-Senator Joe Biden – who was at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee – said he would block any Bush nominee to SCOTUS that may occur in an election year.
So much for the “stolen seat” of Merrick Garland, since all the Senate GOPers did during the last year of Obama’s term was follow that very same “Biden Rule.”
And when Bush II was president the ever-despicable Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader at the time, used the so-called “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster option for all judicial appointments other than to SCOTUS, thereby ensuring that Obama was able to load the lower-level Circuit Court system with activist leftist jurists.
The truth is in the numbers: at the end of Bush II’s term 10 of 13 circuit courts had majorities nominated by Republican presidents. But as of now, nine of them have majorities nominated by Democrat presidents.
In other words, the situation reversed by almost 180 degrees during Obama’s time in office.
There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires anything other than a simple majority for the Senate to act. As it’s been used on judicial appointments, in reality it’s been a tyranny of the minority exploited by the Dem/socialists to pack the court system, right up to and including SCOTUS, with activists more concerned with advancing a “social justice” agenda than with ensuring that proper legal and constitutional principles are observed.
Thus the irony is so thick it can be cut with a knife when Mitch McConnell and the other Senate Republicans used the Democrats’ own traditional strategy, the “nuclear option,” to ensure Gorsuch’s ascension to a seat on SCOTUS.
It’s why the wailing and bleating of the left are music to my ears. Their own chickens have come home to roost.
Brian Baker is a Saugus resident.
