Quote of the Week...from Senator Chuck Schumer

Our Republican colleagues should follow the rule they set in 2016: not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year.                            Charles Schumer.

Charles "Chuck" Schumer is not only the senior United States senator from New York, but is also that body's minority leader for the Democrats.  He was there under ineffective then-minority leader Harry Reid when majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, decided to announce only some three hours after learning of Justice Antonin Scalia's death in February 2016 that he would flatly refuse to consider any replacement nominee from then-Democratic president Barack Obama...in spite of the president's strongly expressed desire to work with the Republican Senate leadership to come up with a nominee more fitting to their ideological orientation.  This unprecedented (and, in my opinion, disgraceful) shunning paid off for McConnell and his party...at least in the short run... after Donald Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton in the November presidential election and the winner nominated very conservative Neil Gorsuch for the position.  Obama, following the refusal of McConnell...and Senate Judiciary Committer Chairman Charles Grassley...to respect the U.S. Constitution regarding their duties in this regard, had gone ahead anyway and nominated Merrick Garland, a federal judge with no ideological trail to speak of.  McConnell wouldn't even show the common decency of meeting with this distinguished judge, at least for the sake of politeness, when he visited the Senate after being nominated.  So with this disgusting spectacle behind us, why is it then that I totally disagree with Schumer's statement?  Well, it's like this...

The whole controversy about McConnell's 2016 decision to stonewall Obama's Supreme Court nominee was based on it being a presidential election year.  After all, every two years all of the House of Representative seats are up for election, as well as one third of the Senate seats...under Schumer's suggestion justices should only be nominated in odd-numbered years, an asinine idea.  I sympathize with the minority leader's criticism of McConnell...but I also feel it is completely legitimate to go ahead with the nomination and hearings process for the nominee to replace Anthony Kennedy, who just announced his retirement.  Trump will doubtless pick the next justice from a much-publicized list that is full of very conservative judges and politicians likely to vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Obamacare, among other issues...here is the crux of where the Democrats are concerned, not the timing: it is unlikely, in my opinion, that the upcoming election will see them take the majority from the Republicans...if anything McConnell's GOP will probably increase their margin of control, so stalling this nomination until after the election is just delaying the inevitable... 

McConnell's action in 2016 to me smacks more of personal animosity against President Obama than any desire to be "fair".  Obama was the duly, constitutionally elected president when Scalia died and vacated his seat, and was thus the one who legitimately had the duty to select Scalia's replacement, just as the Senate in turn had the duty to consider his nominee through advice and consent.  As for precedents in history, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. retired early in 1932...also a presidential election year...Republican president Herbert Hoover wasted no time in nominating a liberal Democrat, Benjamin Cardozo, to replace him.  That process went smoothly...Obama was conducive to something similar in 2016 but McConnell's spitefulness went so far as risking a much more liberal justice later being installed by Hillary Clinton, who at the time was leading the polls.  My concern about all this, and the true test as to whether Senator McConnell is a hypocrite as Chuck Schumer just accused him of being, may come in 2020...

In 2020, the next presidential election year, the Republicans under Mitch McConnell probably will still have the majority in the Senate.  Should a Supreme Court justice die or resign during that year, will the majority leader stay true to his stated principles he claimed to follow in 2016 by delaying any Trump replacement pick until after that election?  Now that's a cut-and-dry indicator of McConnell's integrity level...I expect him to try to weasel out of it all with a lame excuse should that scenario develop, considering his long record of cloaking political expediency in "principles" he makes up as he goes along...