As in the impeachment thing?
Democrats continue to play the short political game while Republicans play the long one and do it much better ….
The boundless cynicism of Mitch McConnell is again on display. The Kentucky Republican, who is the Senate Majority Leader, told a home-state audience that, if there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court in 2020, he will make sure that President Trump’s nominee receives a confirmation vote. This, of course, conflicts with McConnell’s view on the election-year nomination of Merrick Garland, in 2016. After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, on February 13, 2016, McConnell announced that he would refuse to allow a vote on President Obama’s nominee, and thus would keep the seat open for the next President to fill. McConnell has lately made a halfhearted attempt to distinguish the two situations; he said that Supreme Court seats should be kept open in election years when the Senate and the Presidency are controlled by different parties. (Needless to say, he did not raise this purported distinction in 2016.) But the main reason that McConnell might push through a Republican nominee to the Court while blocking a Democratic choice is simple: because he can.
There’s another, less obvious reason that McConnell can game the Supreme Court confirmation process with impunity. The Republican Party has been far more invested in the future of the Supreme Court, and of the judiciary generally, than the Democratic Party has. Judicial appointments, especially to the Supreme Court, are a central pillar of the Republican agenda, and Republican voters will forgive any number of other transgressions if the Party delivers on the courts.
Donald Trump understood this. That’s why, during the 2016 campaign, he released a short list of possible nominees to the Court. The list was largely compiled by Leonard Leo, the executive vice-president of the Federalist Society, and the names on it demonstrated to the Republican base that Trump was serious about following its agenda—starting with overruling Roe v. Wade. Trump’s nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and of dozens of other conservatives to the lower courts, have been crucial to the President’s preservation of his stratospheric level of support from that base. Conservatives forgive Trump his louche personal life and his casual dishonesty because they know that they are getting the judges and the Justices they want.
Democrats are different. Consider what happened after McConnell blocked the Garland nomination. After a few days of perfunctory outrage, most Democratic politicians dropped the issue. Neither President Obama nor Hillary Clinton, in their speeches before the Democratic National Convention, in July, 2016, even mentioned Garland—or the Supreme Court. Its future was apparently something that neither of them wanted to discuss, or thought that their party, or the nation, wanted to hear about.
Four years later, this pattern is recurring…..