Senate Republicans, SCOTUS and Tyranny of the Minority

 

In a past post this blog looked at the growing problem posed by both the Electoral College and the two U.S. senators per state no matter how tiny a state may be - Wyoming has a population of 549,914, Alaska has 731,545 people (it's population has been dropping) and Montana has a population of 960,566.  In contrast, California has a population of 39,937,500, New York has a population of 19.4 million, and Illinois has a population of 12,671,821.  With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the effort by Moscow Mitch McConnell and Der Trumpenfuhrer to force a far right justice - some on Trump's list purportedly do not even support Brown v. Board of Education - onto the Supreme Court, the consequences of a worsening tyranny of a minority of citizens over the majority is becoming frighteningly stark.   Adding insult to injury is the reality that many "red states" suck up far more in federal aid than they pay to Washington and are being supported by "blue states" many of which pay far more to Washington than they receive back. Thus, as a column in the New York Times lays out, Democrats need to take a scorched earth approach to Senate Republicans and, if Democrats take the White House and Senate in November, need to consider expanding the Supreme Court to rectify the tyranny of low population red states.  Here are excerpts:

Two years ago at The Atlantic Festival, Senator Lindsey Graham defended the Republican decision to block President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process is started, we’ll wait to the next election,” Graham said.

Now that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, only a month and a half before the 2020 election, the chance that the senator keeps his word seems infinitesimal. (He has already said that after Brett Kavanaugh, “the rules have changed.”)

Mitch McConnell certainly has no intention of abiding by the so-called McConnell rule, an invention to justify the Senate’s refusal to consider Garland in March 2016.

Replacing a progressive icon on the Supreme Court with a hard-core reactionary — one who will overturn Roe v. Wade, decimate civil rights law and fully unshackle big business — is an existential matter for the right. It is both the culmination of decades of conservative activism and perhaps an insurance policy in case the 2020 election itself ends up being decided by the court, like Bush v. Gore.

The question now is whether Trump and McConnell can be stopped, and what Democrats should do if they aren’t.

Shortly before Ginsburg’s death was announced, Senator Lisa Murkowski told Alaska Public Media that she wouldn’t vote to confirm a new Supreme Court justice this close to the election. The Times’s Jonathan Martin tweeted that another Republican senator, Susan Collins, told him earlier this month that she would oppose seating a new justice in October.

Should Collins hold firm — obviously nothing to count on — two more Republican senators would have to defy their leadership to save an already beaten, suffering, riven country from being torn fully in half.

There’s a potential twist, because of the special election in Arizona to fill John McCain’s old seat. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, is running against Martha McSally, who was appointed to that seat after McCain’s death. If Kelly wins, as he is favored to, he could be seated as early as Nov. 30.

Depending on when the Senate holds confirmation hearings, that could mean only three Republican senators would be required to hold the seat for Joe Biden to fill. It’s doubtful that three Republican senators would show such civic decency, but we should still use every tool at our disposal to demand it of them.

Outraged people should take to the streets en masse. Democrats in the Senate may not be able to stop Republicans from shoving a nominee through before the election or during a lame-duck session, but if it happens they should do all in their power to grind Senate business to a halt.

And if Republicans do give Ginsburg’s seat to some Federalist Society fanatic, Democrats must, if they win back the presidency and the Senate, abolish the filibuster and expand the court, adding two seats to account for both Garland and Ginsburg.

This goes against Joe Biden’s instincts toward bipartisanship and national reconciliation. But if Republicans continue to ruthlessly bend the rules to establish the domination of the minority over the majority, only hardball tactics can restore democratic equilibrium. Republicans will shriek, but their brazen hypocrisy should justify such dramatic moves in the eyes of the public. They’ll be the ones who’ve annihilated whatever legitimacy the court has left.

According to Ginsburg’s granddaughter, the justice made a dying wish: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

It doesn’t matter how exhausted we are, or how difficult the odds. In this hell-spawned year, we can either give up, or give everything we can to stop some of America’s worst men from blotting out the legacy of one of our very best women.