Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is supposed to be one of the savviest operators in Washington, but he made a tactical mistake last week: He said what he was going to do on something very controversial instead of invoking some vague generality.
Mitch is either slipping … or feels so confident that Republicans will regain control of the Senate next year that he really doesn’t care what Democrats think. (OK, he usually doesn’t care anyway, but for appearances sake, you’re supposed to pretend to give a darn about bipartisanship now and then.)
The issue was one of McConnell’s favorites — getting conservative judges appointed to the federal bench, and especially the Supreme Court. McConnell told conservative radio host and columnist Hugh Hewitt that it would be “highly unlikely” that a Supreme Court nominee picked by President Biden would be voted on in 2024 if Republicans take control of the Senate. Frankly, McConnell would probably find some reason to stall Biden in 2023 if he tried to tried to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with two years of his presidency remaining.
Granted, this is the worst-kept secret in Washington. McConnell famously refused to schedule a vote on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 because that was the last year of Obama’s presidency. It was a sneaky, partisan move … that Democrats probably would have pulled if the circumstances had been reversed.
And you could kinda, sorta argue that an appointment that important in the waning days (well months, actually) of an administration should be made by the next president who was about to be elected.
But McConnell and the Republicans jerked the rug out from under that argument by ramming through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation just weeks before voters chose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden for the next presidency. McConnell tried to justify that move by saying the presidency and Senate were held by the same party in 2020, unlike 2016, but that’s a reach.
All of this has been floating around in the background in Washington for a long time, but it is edging to the forefront as nervous Democrats look at two things:
the age and affiliation of the oldest justice (Stephen Breyer, 82, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994) and
the distinct possibility (some say probability) that Republicans will gain at least one Senate seat in the 2022 mid-term elections and make McConnell the majority leader again.
Because of these two factors, more and more Democrats want Breyer to retire at the end of the court’s current term so that Biden can squeeze through a nominee next year, before the November elections, while Democrat Chuck Schumer is still majority leader. They are terrified that Breyer will die in his post just like liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg — without a Senate that would vote on their replacement.
But Breyer frustrates Democrats by cheerfully refusing to hang up his robe, saying. “I don’t really think about (retirement). I enjoy what I’m doing.” Like most aging justices, he knows that the minute he steps down, he goes from being one of the nine most important legal figures in the country to just another civil servant collecting a pension.
The best hope that Democrats have is that they retain Senate control next year, and that’s not out of the question. But if McConnell takes the gavel again in the Senate, they know that they won’t get a nominee confirmed by a Democratic president until one is elected in 2024 … if one is elected, that is.
Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom