No one should truly be surprised that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that his chamber soon will vote on a successor for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
McConnell has proven skilled at using his power, and the liberal Ginsburg’s death at the end of a Republican president’s term provides the rare opportunity to cement a conservative majority on the court. He and President Trump would be foolish not to try.
The bug in this political equation is what McConnell and other Republicans said just four years ago, when there was another unexpected vacancy on the court. They said that such a vote in an election year, when Americans were getting ready to decide who the next president would be, was inappropriate.
President Obama, a Democrat, nominated a judge for the open court seat, but McConnell refused to hold hearings or bring the issue to the Senate floor. The seat remained vacant until 2017, when Trump’s first nominee filled it.
Democrats were angry in 2016 and they are angry now. But who’s kidding whom? If the roles were reversed — if a Democrat was president and Democrats had a majority in the Senate — they would move just as rapidly to find a like-minded successor for a Republican justice.
If the Senate approves Trump’s nomination for Ginsburg’s seat, there is already talk among Democrats that if Joe Biden wins the election and the party takes control of the Senate, they should ram through legislation to “pack the court” with a few extra justices, presumably to be appointed by Biden.
That is a maddeningly dumb idea. At the very least, it would lead to Republicans doing some packing of their own the next time they had control of the White House and Senate. The Supreme Court functions quite well with nine justices, the number it has had for 151 years.
Finding a successor for Ginsburg is poised to put on display everything that’s dysfunctional about Washington — how both parties are determined to stack the deck for their short-term interests instead of doing a little thinking about what’s best for the nation in the decades to come. This constant back and forth, this taking back what you said so sincerely just a short time ago, explains so well how Washington rarely gets anything of substance done. Few if any of the people in power can truly be trusted.
Surprisingly, it has fallen to Biden to assume the role of the adult in the room. He said Sunday that Senate Republicans ought to cool the flames of the country’s division. In fact, four Republicans, if they chose, could deny the GOP a majority vote that it needs to confirm. That kind of willpower seems unlikely, though.
At the least, senators ought to sit down and figure out the rules of the game. For example, does a president in the final year of his term get to nominate a justice? If not, as in 2016, fine. Or if so, as in this year, also fine. But whatever the senators decide, they should keep it consistent and play by the rules. That is not too much to ask of the world’s most deliberative body.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
