86-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is tenaciously fulfilling her duties on the court, but several recent hospitalizations and health scares have revived Democrats’ worries that she won’t make it until after the 2020 election and a seat on the bench will become available.
While President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have vowed to fill any vacancy that occurs while Trump is president, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in 2018 that he would hold open any seat that became vacant once the primaries were underway, leading many to wonder how an open seat would in fact be handled, should such a scenario arise.
Sen. @LindseyGrahamSC: “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait ’til the next election.” #SCOTUS #TheAtlanticFest pic.twitter.com/3he6LCGDeC
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 3, 2018
After all, in 2016 the GOP refused to consider the nomination then-President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland precisely because it was an election year. So in the minds of most Democrats, fair is fair.
Different strokes for different folks
If Ginsburg is forced to step down prior to election, Democrats will surely be screaming about the “hypocrisy” of any GOP steps to fill the vacancy, but is it really hypocritical to use the power you have to reach your political objectives — in this case a Supreme Court that more closely reflects your party’s platform?
McConnell has already said that such a situation would be different this time around, because the president and the majority party in the Senate are the same, something that was not the case in 2016. In other words, the GOP has the power and intends to use it.
Elections have consequences, and putting a Republican president and Republican-majority Senate in power confers the ability to confirm nominees if they choose to do so, just as electing a president and Senate majority from different parties means that nominees can — and likely will — be blocked.
It’s the way the system works, so it stands to reason that the Senate is not likely to deny itself the spoils of elections its members fought and spent millions of dollars, to win.
Political courage required
Graham has already ceded to requests from McConnell and Trump to investigate 2020 candidate Joe Biden’s involvement with Ukraine, including his actions to secure the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board his son, Hunter, sat.
After years of being something of a GOP dissenter on many issues — Rush Limbaugh famously referred to him as “Lindsey Graham-nesty” for his liberal stance on immigration — Graham now deserves kudos for his strong and decisive handling of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
Graham would be wholly justified in saying that he has changed his mind about filling a Supreme Court vacancy for any number of reasons, not the least of those being — as Trump himself put it — the way Democrats have continued to fight in a “vicious” manner on impeachment and always “stick together.”
Just because Republicans have not always used the power that they have been given by the electorate doesn’t mean that 2020 wouldn’t be a fine time to start.
The public has responded well to Republicans standing up for themselves and for the people they represent — many of whom are tired of the left’s assault on our founding principles — and would welcome another conservative on the highest court. Let’s hope Graham is responsive to the wishes of those who sent him to Washington, rather than making any further efforts to appease a group who will hate him no matter what he does.
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