Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell committed a classic Washington gaffe the other day — by telling the truth: There’s no way the Senate will confirm anyone President Obama names to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat.
To find a Senate controlled by one party OK’ing a high-court nominee from a president of the other for a seat that opens up in a presidential election year, you have to go back to the 1880s.
That’s decades before women won the right to vote. It was a very, very different nation.
Today’s America is at least three decades into the “nuclear” era of judicial politics — and it’s been at DEFCON 1 at least since Democrats went full-ICBM on Robert Bork back in 1987.
Fifteen years ago, Democrats filibustered a circuit-court nominee, Miguel Estrada, purely for fear he might then be an impossible-to-stop Supreme Court pick.
Chuck Schumer, now Senate Democratic leader-in-waiting, vowed in 2007 to block any high-court nominees that might come from President George W. Bush in his final year.
Obama himself, in his Senate days, tried to filibuster to keep John Roberts from joining the court.
As president, he has attacked the court from the podium in a State of the Union Address. He also sent Vice President Joe Biden out to threaten political war on the court as an institution if it dared to strike down the ObamaCare law.
When President Obama now talks constitutional duties and nonpartisanship, it’s just wind. His own actions, and his party’s, rob his fine words of meaning.