![]() ![]() How Ginsburg made the law fairer for every woman (Photo by Tom Brenner/Getty Images) Tom Brenner/Getty Images North America/Getty Images Justice Ginsburg spoke to over 300 attendees about the Supreme Court's previous term. WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 12: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivers remarks at the Georgetown Law Center on September 12, 2019, in Washington, DC. Joni Ernst of Iowa, also in a tight race for reelection, said in February 2016: “We will see what the people say this fall and our next president, regardless of party, will be making that nomination.” The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.” Cory Gardner, who is trailing in his reelection race, had this to say nine months out from the 2016 election: “I think we’re too close to the election. I would say that if it was a Republican president.”Ĭolorado Sen. Marco Rubio, now acting chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said in March 2016, “I don’t think we should be moving forward on a nominee in the last year of this president’s term. Graham is far from the only senator to make solemn “principled” promises.įlorida Sen. ![]() Graham - now chairman of the key Judiciary Committee and in a surprisingly tight race for re-election in South Carolina - doubled down on his 2016 comments restating his stance during an interview in 2018, saying, “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election.” And it’s worth reading their statements from back then to fully appreciate the head-spinning hypocrisy at work. Republican senators strained themselves trying to get in line behind their leader, echoing the argument that their blatantly partisan decision to block a vote on a Supreme Court nominee nine months before an election was indeed really about principles. McConnell said that stance showed that his decision was “about a principle, not a person” and tried to pass it off as a long-standing tradition (it is not). ![]() (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) Alex Wong/Getty ImagesĪttention Mitch McConnell: Filling RBG's seat now could break American democracy Senate Republicans held the weekly luncheon to discuss their agenda. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks to members of the press after the weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon at Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Searching for a way to make the naked power grab look principled, McConnell seized on a statement made by Vice President Joe Biden back in 1992, in which Biden asserted that there should be no vote on a Supreme Court nominee in an election year. McConnell went on to make a bold bet, refusing to even hold hearings on Obama’s centrist court nominee, Merrick Garland. In 2016, when conservative Scalia - a good personal friend of Ginsburg - suddenly died during Obama’s last year in office, then-candidate Trump said the GOP should block the nominee (“It’s called delay, delay, delay,” he said). And the stakes are always highest when a Supreme Court pick is involved. Instead, situational ethics have been weaponized in Washington. It’s not an argument that is operative today. They talked about preserving our institutions and traditions. It’s a political gift for a beleaguered President weighed down in the polls by a seemingly endless series of self-inflicted scandals and the tragic fact of nearly 200,000 Americans dead from his administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic.īefore Trump, Republicans talked a lot about values and character. Now, with less than 50 days until an election in which President Donald Trump does not seem to be trying to win the popular vote as a matter of strategy, he said he will try to push through a conservative replacement for the liberal Ginsburg, no doubt with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s help. But they have appointed four of the last six picks to the Supreme Court, based on the support of GOP senators who represent less than half the American people. Republicans have lost the popular vote in all but one of the last seven presidential elections. The death of Ginsburg highlights just how much the popular legitimacy of our democratic institutions are at stake in this election - and how it could escalate our already bitter partisan and personal divisions. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’”īut on Saturday, less than 24 hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Graham tweeted, “I will support President in any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.” ![]() “I want you to use my words against me,” the South Carolina Republican said. ![]()
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