SCOTUS Agonistes
expected to confirm forthwith nominees made by a president of the opposing party to high-court vacancies arising in presidential election years. Indeed, that has happened... as recently as 1888. And in 1992 when a young Judiciary Committee Chairman named Joe Biden said that presidents shouldn’t get to appoint justices in the last year of their terms, that was totally different... Just like it was different when Senator Chuck Schumer said the same in 2007, because the presidents then were Republicans. Not that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t cite longstanding precedent for his own decision to ignore Garland – the first nominee on whom the Senate took no action since the nomination of Stanley Matthews in 1881. (A few nominees withdrew before the Senate could non-act, like Douglas Ginsburg in 1987. Ginsburg smoked pot with his law students, and thus
Senates, the Democrats claim, are expected to confirm forthwith nominees made by a president of the opposing party to high- court vacancies arising in presidential election years. Indeed, that has happened... became the Drug War’s last public casualty.) To be fair to McConnell, he never claimed to be making anything but a political argument: That the voters, having in their infinite wisdom re-elected President Barack Obama in 2012 but then flipped the Senate red in 2014, deserved a chance to make up their minds. And so, pursuant to the Senate’s power of “advice and consent,” Republicans advised the president that they would not, could not consent to anyone he chose.
By Ilya Shapiro
American Consequences
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