Cast Iron Brains is here, as regularly scheduled, to discuss the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, GOP shitbaggery old and new, and probably some other stuff, too.
Here’s the latest version of the Cast Iron Brains Official Election Forecast Model, updated as of 8:00 pm Monday night.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead, throwing another layer of chaos all over the 2020 presidential election. There was some speculation back in 2013 that the Obama administration sent out some feelers to see if she might be thinking about retirement, but she obviously never did. Ginsburg herself denied that Obama was so uncouth as to ask.
Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, on the other hand, was a bit more crassly politically motivated and worked out, apparently.
Here’s the video the Washington Post put together, highlighting a bunch of comments made by Republicans in 2016 in contrast with what they had to say this past weekend.
One way or another, the Senate is going to have to figure out how to fix this process, or there simply won’t be appointments to the Supreme Court made unless the President and the Senate are of the same party. Not ideal!—especially considering that, historically, this hasn’t been an intractably partisan process. In 2017, I offered one possible way to unfuck the process. I’ll excerpt the fun part here:
“Mitch McConnell--a quivering cartoon turtle without honor, but who lacks the temerity and bone to be a proper villain--last year attempted to permanently break the nomination and confirmation process for installing new justices on the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016. A few hours later--perhaps with Scalia’s pipe still smoldering next to his deathbed on that Texas ranch--McConnell announced that the vacancy would not be filled by Barack Obama, but by whoever happened to become the next president, some eleven months hence. This was an unprecedented display of pure partisan cockbaggery that McConnell (and, in short order, most of his Republican colleagues) weakly feinted to mask as some sort of high-principled, hard-shelled defense of the democratic voice of the American people. This was a farce, of course--a naked fulfillment of McConnell’s pre-inaugural determination that Obama would face uncompromising resistance from Republicans, and his 2010 assertion that Republicans’ main goal would be to make Obama a one-term president. That he did this while peeking out from behind a smarm-choked deference to the will of the people only revealed how cowardly he knew his own position to truly be. Obama may have won that second term, but Mitch certainly wasn’t going to let him have all of it.”
The so-called “Biden rule” is no such thing, rather a warning that Biden gave in a speech in June of 1992, suggesting that Bush 41 should not nominate anyone to the Court, should a seat come open over the summer. Citing this as a defense of the actions taken in 2016 by McConnell and the Republicans makes about as much sense as claiming that denying a president of the opposing party of whoever controls the Senate for four or eight years is just an implementation of the “McCain rule.”
Those who want to blame Harry Reid and the Democrats for starting all this nonsense don’t have much of a leg to stand on. The Republicans weren’t blocking Obama’s judicial nominees because of any particular complaints about their qualifications or alleged extreme ideologies—they just didn’t want to lose the conservative advantage on the federal DC circuit court of appeals. Besides, if you think McConnell only broke the norm because Reid showed him the way, you have to send me a cool fifty bucks, just for being a moron.
