The recent passing of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has given the GOP the opportunity to make another power grab, this time, in the form of rush to make a life-time appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court before the 2020 presidential election. Within days of Ginsberg’s death, Trump announced that he had already begun the search for a replacement and that the replacement would take place within the next 7 weeks before the election.
This is contrary to Senates practice over the past 40 years which has consistently taken almost 3 months to appoint Supreme Court justices including selection by the President, vetting by the Senate Judiciary Committee and then a final vote on the Senate floor. Now that the republican controlled senate eliminated the filibuster in 2017, the party that controls the senate could go through the entire process without a single vote from the minority party.
Based on this process and arguing that appointments to the Supreme Court should not take place in an election year, when Justice Anthony Scalia died in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, refused to hold a confirmation vote for President Obama’s nominee – Merrick Garland. Similarly, during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in opposition to Garland’s appointment, Committee chair, Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, was even more emphatic “use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president (elected) in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’”
Within hours of Ginsberg’s death, however, Senate republicans seem to have lost their compassion for letting the democratic process run it’s course, when McConnell called for a floor foot on and Graham said he would support anyone President Trump nominated. Even Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who, after Trump announced the move to rush the nominee through the Senate, and recalling the GOP commitment in 2016, said she “would not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election,” began back tracking just days after making this pronouncement. She now says she could vote in favor of the Trump’s nominee if process is not being rushed to meet “a deadline that is hard and fast.”
However, the Senate Republic and Trump’s latest judicial power grab and an unanticipated backlash after Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit judge and former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia as his pick to replace Ginsberg, when held his now infamous COVID-19 super spreader meet and great for the new nominee. As a result several of the senators present at the event have since tested positive for the disease and are now attending Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearings which began on Monday October 12. Sen. Graham who was also present at the meet and greet for Judge Barrett has refused to be tested for COVID.
The ill-regard for the health of others and the rushed proceedings has caused consternation among democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that this “sham hearing — on a holiday, 22 days from Election Day, during a COVID-19 outbreak in the Judiciary Committee with a likely-exposed Chairman who won’t get tested — shows just how far the GOP will go to steal another Supreme Court seat & hand our courts over to extremists…”
As if to confirm the lopsided and calamitous process, instead of the usual manner for announcing a Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearing, in which the chairman states that the hearing is for the purpose of “considering the nomination,” instead, Graham pronounced that this is “the hearing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court…”
Because the vote in the Senate to confirm Judge Barrett could be close, every vote will count. Contact Senator Murkowski and tell her that rush to place another conservative idealogue on the Supreme Court threatens the basis of democracy the country was founded on and that she should stick to her original commitment to wait until after the election to fill the position.