By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--February 15, 2016
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This morning, Dan made the point that Mitch McConnell seems to be hanging the GOP's hopes of stopping an Obama SCOTUS appointment on a weird procedural argument. "The American people" he claims, "should have a say." As Dan correctly argues, they already did. First they selected Obama, and then they selected a Republican Senate to stop him.
Obama gets to make his Supreme Court selection - a person who will, undoubtedly, share his disdain for the Constitution and the individual liberties it protects. The Senate has the responsibility of rejecting that person. They shouldn't be blocking the nominee in support of an imaginary procedural imperative. They should be denying him access to the court because they know full well what any Obama appointee will do once he picks up the gavel.“We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,” Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington. “The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.” Schumer’s assertion comes as Democrats and liberal advocacy groups are increasingly complaining that the Supreme Court with Bush’s nominees – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito – has moved quicker than expected to overturn legal precedents. Senators were too quick to accept the nominees’ word that they would respect legal precedents, and “too easily impressed with the charm of Roberts and the erudition of Alito,” Schumer said.
“There is no doubt that we were hoodwinked,” said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.Obviously, back then, Republicans whined about how Schumer was thwarting the Constitution. In short, they made all the arguments that Democrats are currently making. ...And they were just as wrong. Schumer and his pals had every right to try and stop Bush's appointee, just as modern Republicans have a responsibility to stop Obama's. This is separation of powers in action. A denial of consent is exactly the kind of check on presidential power that the founders intended.
Schumer said there were four lessons to be learned from Alito and Roberts: Confirmation hearings are meaningless, a nominee’s record should be weighed more heavily than rhetoric, “ideology matters,” and “take the president at his word.”We'd like to thank Chuck Schumer for providing Mitch McConnell with such a succinct - and absolutely correct - summation of his duties. We should, as Schumer said, "do everything in our power to prevent one more ideological ally" from joining Ginsberg and Sotomayor on the court.
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