Shut Down the Supreme Court Confirmation

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Mitch McConnell knows that if he can place Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, his party can lose the presidential election, but still win the GOP’s long-term battle to shift policy to the hard right. Barrett would create a 6-3 court majority that is archconservative on social issues and a corporate rubber stamp on economic issues — and that majority could permanently alter American jurisprudence. That’s why McConnell on Friday made clear that he is not deterred, even by a deadly pandemic. Even though there is a coronavirus outbreak in the US Senate and the White House, and even though Barrett’s nomination announcement may have been a super-spreader event, Republicans are still refusing to delay the confirmation hearings. Indeed, even though current Senate rules do not permit remote voting and require senators’ physical presence in a potential COVID hot zone in order to achieve a required Senate quorum, McConnell seems determined to force a confirmation vote in that hot zone. This is why this new op-ed in the New York Daily News is so important: It reviews how Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and every other Democrat in Congress can stall Barrett’s nomination. To be clear: this is not just a Senate fight — House Democrats, who are in that chamber’s majority, have a huge role to play, too.

What Would McConnell Do? Written by Demand Progress executive director David Segal and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, the op-ed lays out various tactics that can be employed. For more than a week, Segal, Teachout and I have been waived off by liberals whose culture of learned helplessness has led them to insist that there is no point in trying to delay Trump’s Supreme Court pick. Circumstances have obviously changed, which only underscores the point that fighting these battles is always worth it, because you never know what might happen. The new oped from Segal and Teachout — along with our ongoing reporting — shows why you shouldn’t believe Democrats who always insist they are powerless. “Premature assertions of hopelessness are endemic to establishment Democratic politicians,” Segal and Teachout write. “This even passes for savvy: If nothing ever happens, because you convince yourself nothing can be done, then you’re never wrong.” But Democratic naysayers like Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse are indeed wrong — Segal and Teachout write that they consulted with “a dozen experts who told us the insiders were too pessimistic, and circulated a memo with 19 different ideas” of what both the Senate and House could do to stall the nomination. And yet, on Thursday the New York Times reported that “Democrats have opted against using parliamentary tactics to grind the Senate to a complete halt to try to delay a confirmation vote until after the election on November 3, as some progressive groups have demanded.” To know that this is a preemptive and unnecessary surrender, just ask yourself: If Republicans were in the minority, what would McConnell do? Segal and Teachout offer the answer in their oped. They make clear exactly why Democrats must fight as hard as they can and refuse to preemptively surrender — and why Democratic activists must demand action from their senators and representatives in Congress: (Schumer) should seek guidance from a counterintuitive source, one frequently standing just a few feet away: He should do whatever Mitch McConnell would do. We all know that if the roles were reversed, McConnell would do all in his power to whip the Republican Conference into line and slow things down… A postponement of just a few weeks — until after Election Day — might stop the nomination altogether. If Mark Kelly defeats Martha McSally (R-Az.) in the race to fill the remainder of John McCain’s term, then he will be seated right away. Two Republican senators have already indicated they oppose the current hasty process, so just one more would need to defect in order to get Republicans to wait until after inauguration to move forward. A modest deferral could mean that Joe Biden would pick the next Supreme Court justice, and instead of having the court fall into ironclad control by the far-right, we could have a more balanced court.

VictorChristian on October 5th, 2020 at 14:20 UTC »

Serious question - how would they do this? Democrats don’t have the numbers in the Senate.

This underscores how incredibly important every single election is. We focus on presidential elections because they’re marketable but the midterm elections where we vote for house reps and sometimes Senators are probably more important.

You may hate McConnell and Trump but one thing we’ve learned is how incredibly powerful their offices are - and maybe democrats need to grow a pair (ovaries or testicles) and freaking pile drive some real policy through.

uknowitstrue on October 5th, 2020 at 11:32 UTC »

If we have the power to delay now that the senate GOP has covid running rampant through it, we absolutely should.

nousernamefound13 on October 5th, 2020 at 11:30 UTC »

"If the roles were reversed" A little over 4 years ago, they were. And he did