Republican Hypocrisy and Constitutional Etiquette

George Will, a longtime conservative columnist and former Republican - who sadly for too long was an apologist for the extremist shift in the GOP - has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the rank hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell and likely nearly all of the Senate Republicans who could not wait for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's body yo cool before launching plans to replace her with a far right extremist.  Even more disgusting is the celebrating among some of the Christofascists over Ginsburg's passing.  To say these people are vile is an understatement.   Among the targets in Will's column is Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, a/k/a Miss G among male escort circles, who is utterly ignoring the excuses he made in 2016 for refusing to hold hearings or a vote on Barack Obama's nominee.  Hypocrisy and immorality are now the norm among today's Republican Party which has become the party of Trump.  Here are column highlights:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina contortionist, illustrates the perils of attempted cleverness by people with negligible aptitude for it. He says that the principle he enunciated in 2016 and reaffirmed in 2018 — that he would not support confirming a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of President Trump’s term — has expired. One reason he gives is — really — that Democrats in 2013 ended filibusters for circuit-court nominees.

The pandemic of national cynicism that the likes of Graham exacerbate is engulfing the Supreme Court, an institution whose functioning will be especially damaged by it. Immediately after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, Senate Republicans concocted a principle in order to give a patina of high-mindedness to something they were determined to do anyway. Now, for the same purpose, they have concocted a codicil that essentially nullifies the principle.

In 2016, slathering on populist rhetoric (about “the American people” having a “voice”), they proclaimed that no Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed in a presidential election year. Now they assert, without pretending to have an argument: Oh, never mind, because unlike in 2016, the Senate majority and the president are of the same party.

[T]he nation’s often ferocious political competition, although framed by the Constitution, should be lubricated by prudence, whereby ferocity is tempered by a statesmanlike refusal to exercise every power the Constitution grants.

Sixteen Republicans who were in the Senate in 2016 and who are seeking reelection this year said (Susan Collins did not say this) that refusing to confirm a new justice during a presidential election year was high statesmanship. How many will have the effrontery to vote for someone nominated while presidential voting is underway, or after the election even if the nominator loses?

But if just four non-plastic Republican senators do not ignore their caucus’s pretended 2016 principle, the coming nominee cannot be confirmed before the election. And if Trump loses, perhaps even this amazingly malleable Republican caucus might not confirm his nominee before Joe Biden’s inauguration. So, whomever Trump nominates might be about to have a tortuous Merrick Garland experience of disappointment.

Suppose, however — not altogether implausibly — that the Republican Senate caucus is incapable of embarrassment. Suppose Biden wins and Democrats have a net gain of at least three Senate seats. And suppose that either before the election, or before the new Senate is sworn in on Jan. 3, Republicans confirm a new justice. And suppose Senate Democrats, spurred by their party’s enraged base and enabled by their quick abolition of the filibuster, enlarge the Supreme Court by at least four members (two fewer than Franklin Roosevelt envisioned).

This would erase the principal achievement — three Trump nominees — for which Senate Republicans, during four years of canine obedience to the nominator, have rationalized shedding their dignity and shredding their reputations. This institutional vandalism by Democrats would be a grievous injury to the court, which has, so far, largely escaped being drenched by the Niagara of public contempt for the great institutions of national governance, not least Congress.

Confidence in the court is as perishable as the reputations of the senators of both parties who in the next few years might cause the court to be seen as just another scuffed and soiled plaything in the nation’s increasingly tawdry political game. If so, the Republicans among those senators will be able to see the monument to their careers when they look east from the Capitol’s Senate wing, across First Street NE, to the court’s glistening white building, where a liberal majority will be presiding on a lengthened bench for a long time.