***
[Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell has made a de facto change to the US Constitution by expanding the
Senate’s advice & consent to include the NRA.]
The Senate Defers to the
N.R.A.
by The Editorial Board March 24, 2016
It turns out that the most
important voice in the Supreme Court nomination battle is not the American
people’s, as Senate Republicans have insisted from the moment Justice Antonin
Scalia died last month. It is not even that of the senators. It’s the National
Rifle Association’s.
That is what the majority
leader, Mitch McConnell, said the other day when asked about the possibility of
considering and confirming President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, after
the November elections. “I can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the
United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame-duck session, a nominee
opposed by the National Rifle Association,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
Put aside the absurd rationales
Senate Republicans have trotted out for not holding a hearing on the Garland
nomination, and consider how extreme this latest position is. As long as
Republicans control the Senate, Mr. McConnell says, they will delegate their
judgment to the N.R.A.’s paranoid far-right lobbyists, whom nobody elected, and
who staunchly oppose measures, like universal background checks, supported by
90 percent of Americans — and three-quarters of N.R.A. members.
Mr. McConnell says he wants
the next president to fill the vacancy. But if a Democrat wins the election,
the N.R.A. will surely oppose any person he or she nominates. What will Mr.
McConnell and his caucus do then?
In other words, forget the
voters. Forget that Judge Garland has been supported and praised by top
Republicans and Democrats for years. The N.R.A. doesn’t like him — for no
fact-based reason — and that’s all that matters.
It is hard to calculate the
damage Republicans are doing to the nation and the court, even as poll after
poll shows that a majority of Americans believe the Senate should hold hearings
and an up-or-down vote.
Chief Justice John Roberts
Jr., a conservative, has spoken out against the increasing politicization of
the nomination process. Ten days before Justice Scalia’s death, he said at a
public forum, “Look at my more recent colleagues, all extremely well qualified
for the court,” referring to Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and
Elena Kagan. “The votes were, I think, strictly on party lines for the last
three of them, or close to it, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
His remarks seemed to come
out of another era, back when the Senate confirmed nominees like Justice Scalia
in 1986 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 by unanimous or near-unanimous votes.
The process has been deteriorating
for a while, but the current Republican caucus has now driven it off the rails.
Under its twisted logic, there is no reason for the Senate ever to consider a
nominee from a president of the opposing party. To do so, the members seem to
suggest, would be doing the president a favor. This isn’t governance; it is the
unhinged tantrum of a party whose ideological rigidity has already paralyzed
Congress, and now threatens the Supreme Court itself.
***
