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Democrats should remember Graham's power grab today and mercilessly follow suit
Manu Raju @mkraju 1hLindsey Graham recalls a conversation he had with Chuck Schumer in 2013 when Schumer informed him that Reid was invoking the nuclear option for nominees other than for SCOTUS. He said that he told Schumer he would regret it. Today, Graham says, Schumer will regret it
...Graham followed the Democrats response to republicans' uniform obstruction of Pres. Obama's judicial nominees with a further corruption of the process, expanding the number of conservative judges in direct contradiction of the results of decades of elections where republicans actually lost the popular vote...
from WashMonthly:
Republicans in the Senate mounted a historic blockade of President Obama’s judicial nominees during the final two years of his second term, resulting in shortages on federal benches and backlogs in cases, all in the hopes of leaving them open for a Republican president. Republican Senate Leader McConnell has been laughing about it for years, considering it finest accomplishment. Most crucial was the refusal by McConnell to even allow a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, using the fig leaf justification that it was during the 2016 election year–only to attempt to rush through a far-right justice to replace Ruth Bader-Ginsburg literally just days before the 2020 election. Hypocrisy is a mainstay of American politics, but even so the brazenness of this case by Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham is remarkable.
The result of the Republican strategy has been a historic packing of the courts by ultra-conservative activist judges. As of this writing, Trump and the Republican Senate have confirmed an astonishing 218 federal judges, mostly conservative white men, many of them deeply unqualified far-right activists with little judicial experience. These judges have altered the balance not only of the Supreme Court, but also myriad lower circuit courts. These judges are not just temperamentally and philosophically conservative: most are committed Republican partisans, approved by the arch-right Federalist Society, and subscribe to a view of the Constitution in Exile premised on the belief that essentially every progressive reform since the New Deal and even Teddy Roosevelt has been an unconstitutional infringement on corporate and property rights. It is a degree of far-right judicial radicalism that most Americans barely begin to appreciate, only because the cases challenging long settled law have only just begun to wind their way through the courts.
The other important context for this Republican court-packing is that it reflects an attempt to control national policy even as conservatives lose the ability to win elections nationally. Conservatives already govern illegitimately through an array of anti-democratic structures that make white exurban conservative voters count much more than urban liberal voters and people of color. Many of these structures were explicitly set up by the Founders or in the Jim Crow era to benefit Slave States and former Confederate States. The electoral college has allowed Republicans to control the White House for 12 of the last 20 years despite winning the popular vote only once during that time–and the process itself warps presidential elections toward the interests of more conservative-leaning voters in “swing” states. The Senate is controlled by a Republican “majority” despite the fact that Democratic Senators represent 15 million more Americans than Republican Senators do. State legislatures and House seats are gerrymandered such that Republicans dominate many state legislatures despite losing the statewide vote, and control more House seats than they would if districts were drawn across the country in non-partisan fashion. That’s on top of active voter suppression efforts in many states that work to shut out the rising voices of young people, urban progressives and people of color.
The fact that a president elected by minority vote, aided by a Senate representing a minority of Americans, in a system already designed to advantage conservative voices over liberal ones, should be able to rig the courts for decades with judges who will not only thwart future legislation but reverse hard-won gains, is an absurd insult to democracy. The courts have already been packed. If Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court, they will have been intolerably packed, in the service of a revanchist apartheid regime designed to overrule America’s growing progressive majority and prevent it from solving pressing crises like inequality, corporate consolidation and climate change.
read more: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/10/10/republicans-have-already-packed-the-courts-its-up-to-democrats-how-to-rebalance-them/
...there will be no need to apologize for undoing decades of republican court-packing by using precisely the same broken rules Graham employed to thwart the will of Americans. AFTER we set the courts on a more equitable path, more accurately reflecting the will of the electorate through the legislators they advance to office, then we can begin the process of negotiating reforms. Not until.
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