Op-Ed: Confirming a Supreme Court Nominee Is the Democratic Thing To Do - No Matter What the Left Tells You
The latest example of liberals’ hypocrisy in invoking the word “democracy” when actually trying to thwart the democratic process is evident in the call to wait until 2021 to nominate and confirm a ninth Supreme Court justice.
Recent headlines indicate Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska may not support a Trump nominee unless he wins re-election (though Murkowski later appeared to backtrack on her announcement), meaning the Democrats will at least one more Republican defector and Democrat Mark Kelly if he were to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona and be seated before the confirmation vote.
However that plays out, the argument of some liberals that a confirmation vote would be “undemocratic” is exactly the opposite of the truth.
While we live in a republic, the democratic component of the republic played out in the 2018 elections after liberal protesters last tried to shut down the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.
One month after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, voters responded in historic fashion by defeating four senators from the party opposing the White House in a midterm election for only the second time in the history of the country.
The establishment media ignored this almost unprecedented event. The president defeated twice as many opposing senators in any other midterm in U.S. history except for the Great Depression, when Republican senators who were elected in the ’20s lost in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first midterm.
The fact that the Republicans today have 53 votes to potentially confirm a nominee is precisely the result of the democratic process that reacted against liberal protests of a Supreme Court nominee.
The democratic surge that elected those four GOP Senate challengers one month after Kavanaugh’s confirmation is even more noteworthy considering it happened when Democrats won many races in the House — where Senate confirmations are not an issue.
In essence, the Democrats are disingenuously asking for a mulligan. They lost the 2018 Senate elections due to their nasty protests of Kavanaugh, which created a 53-47 GOP majority in the Senate to enable them to confirm the next Supreme Court nominee.
Now that it is time to fill the court with a pick, the Democrats want to ignore the 2018 Senate elections they lost and request that they get a second chance at the ballot box.
Therefore, it is precisely the democratic process that should result in a replacement within the normal time it takes to replace a Supreme Court justice, 65 to 70 days, which in this case means a confirmation vote by Thanksgiving week.
The confirmation could fail, of course. In addition to the assumption the 47 Democrats vote in lockstep, if Murkowski and Collins do not support confirmation, then the Democrats likely need two more votes.
Arizona often seats a newly elected senator quickly, so while McSally would vote to confirm before Election Day, if the vote is after Election Day and she loses, then Mark Kelly could give the Democrats one more vote, meaning they might need only one GOP defector.
In summary, the democratic process put President Trump in a place to nominate the next Supreme Court justice (every president in history with an opening in an election year has nominated one), and the democratic process gave Republicans a 53-47 edge that could easily lead to one.
Regardless, this is the latest example of many on the left saying they are part of a “democracy movement” while opposing democracy any time it does not advance Democrats’ election chances.
Other examples of the hypocrisy of many liberals on “democracy reforms” include:
Redistricting
Support for Eric Holder’s push for nonpartisan redistricting commissions was immediately abandoned when the Democrats took over Virginia and then voted 1,400 to 200 at their state convention to try to stop a public referendum against gerrymandering.
They also violated their own rules in California’s nonpartisan commission rules by trying to divide up Los Angeles with gerrymandering to defeat Republicans in surrounding areas and reacted hysterically to the proposal that the same rules should apply to Massachusetts, where many of their left-wing Harvard professors tell Republican states they need nonpartisan reform.
Money in Politics
Many who argue money in politics distorts the democratic process receive most of their money from ActBlue, which funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats and liberal causes, including $346 million from people who claim they are unemployed.
Accepting the Results of the Election
The charges that Donald Trump is the only one who might challenge the result of the election ring particularly hollow after Democrats spent much of his first term trying to impeach and remove a duly elected president.
In addition, Hillary Clinton urged Joe Biden not to concede if he loses and Democrats have amassed lawyers to send to every state.
Hypocritical arguments that the duly elected president and the U.S. Senate charged with picking a Supreme Court replacement should not exercise their democratic duties is not a pro-democracy argument.
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