House of Eratosthenes

The truth is, on all of this, we owe the country a broader discussion. Competing claims about Senate customs cannot fully explain where we are…

Catastrophe looms right around the corner. The country will be fundamentally changed forever. When a Republican president makes a Supreme Court nominee. They have hauled out the very same tactics for fifty years. Some of the opposition’s more intense, but the doomsday predictions about the outcome of nominating these extremists like John Paul Stevens, David Souter? Why, somehow, everyone knows in advance that nominations like Bork, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are certain to whip up national frenzies… while nominations like Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are calm events by comparison. This blaring asymmetry predates our recent disputes. And it comes, my colleagues, from a fundamental disagreement on the role of a judge in our republic.

We just have a fundamental difference of opinion. We just heard the Democratic Leader name all of these things that are threatened by this nominee. It sounds very similar to the tunes we’ve heard before. We, like many Americans, want judges to fulfill a limited role the Constitution assigns to them: Stick to text, resolve cases impartially, and leave policymaking to the people and their representatives, which is what we do here…

But the left thinks the framers of our country got this all wrong. They botched the job. The people who wrote the Constitution didn’t understand what a judge ought to be. As several Senate Democrats have reaffirmed in recent days, they find it quaint and naive to think a judge would simply follow the law. Scalia used to say if you want to make policy, why don’t you run for office? That’s not what we do here…what they are looking for is a small panel of lawyers with elite educations to reason backward from outcomes and enlighten all the rest of us with their morals and political judgment. Whether the Constitution speaks to the issue or not. They know best what’s for us. No matter what the Constitution or the law may say. And for the last several decades, in many cases, that’s what they have gotten. One activist decision after another, giving us subjective preferences of one side of the force of law…

President Obama actually was refreshingly honest about this. He said he wanted to appoint judges who had empathy. Think about that for a minute. What if you are the litigant before the judge — for whom the judge does not have empathy? You’re in tough shape. So, you give them credit for being pretty honest about this. That’s what they’re looking for…And that is clearly why we have taken on such an outsized, combative atmosphere with regard to these confirmations…

The democrats aren’t afraid to play politics with the Supreme Court. Republican Senators have consistently applied a more congenial standard to nominees to the nation’s highest court: Is he or she certifiably crazy? If not, then confirm. Don’t worry about how many conservatives or how many liberals are there already, and don’t worry about going home and telling your constituents “I kept this liberal whack-job out of there.” Just confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Which they did, 96 to 3. That was not — I think both sides would agree — because RBG represented the mainstream of the country’s thinking on issues likely to come before the Supreme Court.

This is important because the Senate is important. Keeping the Senate, in 2020, is almost as important as keeping the White House. It might even be more important than that.

A lot of people are out there ready to punch the chad for Placeholder Joe and Proud-of-Rapists Kamala because they don’t like President Trump’s combativeness. Or, they’re ready to stay home over this genteel-language issue, even though they support Trump’s policies. As we’ve seen over the last few days, a lot of the heated and counterproductive bickering is in Congress, and I’d really like to know what people think about this “blaring asymmetry.” Some liberal ACLU hack gets nominated to the Supreme Court and everybody falls in line, and starts fawning. Remember Elana Kagan’s nomination? Oh, she’s so funny! Just adorable.

Republican President nominates a learned and steady voice like Barrett and it has to be World War III. Seriously, what do they think about all that?

Truth is, for this function…and maybe for any other…we don’t need any democrats in the Senate at all. They’re just there to scheme for power, slander their enemies and stir the crock.

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McConnell’s SpeechTuesday, October 27th, 2020

McConnell’s Speech
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020