Schumer to Trump: You need to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court

“It would unite the country,” you see. I’m sure. Democrats would stop attacking every word out of Trump’s mouth and every action or inaction he takes. Conservatives would be just fine with handing the left its first Supreme Court majority since the Warren Court. Everyone would be happy. Yeah, that would go over great. I’m sure the president will rush to follow Chuck Schumer’s advice:

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Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) privately urged President Trump in a phone call earlier this week to nominate federal Judge Merrick B. Garland, then President Barack Obama’s third nominee to the Supreme Court who was summarily shunned by Senate Republicans in 2016, to replace retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Trump had called Schumer on Tuesday afternoon for a Supreme Court-centered conversation that lasted less than five minutes, according to a person familiar with the call. Schumer, the person said, pressed the president to name Garland to succeed Kennedy, arguing doing so would help unite the country. Schumer also warned the president that nominating a jurist who would be hostile to Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a woman’s right to an abortion, and to Obama’s signature health-care law, would be “cataclysmic” and damage Trump’s legacy, the person added, requesting anonymity since they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The conceit of Democrats where Garland is concerned is the idea that the rest of the country cares as much as they do about this “stolen” Supreme Court seat, and is clamoring like they are for revenge and/or redemption.

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No one outside the Democrat political class and left-wing activists cares that Garland didn’t get confirmed to SCOTUS. Obama nominated him, the Senate declined to confirm him. Those are the breaks. That’s like saying Anthony Kennedy’s seat was stolen because it should have gone to Robert Bork. (And it should have, but it didn’t and that’s how things go sometimes when the opposition party controls the process.) Of course, Democrats will say that at least Bork got a vote. Yes he did, and accompanying that vote was one of the most despicable smear campaigns ever waged against a public figure. The 2016 Republicans treated Merrick Garland much better by simply declining to hold hearings or a vote. They didn’t find it necessary to turn Garland into some sort of evil monster to justify not confirming him, like the 1986 Democrats did to Bork. By the way, the 1986 Democrats actually screwed their future counterparts. Bork died in 2012, during the presidency of Barack Obama. Had he been on the Supreme Court at the time of his death, Obama would have been able to nominate his replacement just after being re-elected. The Court would have swung to the left. Instead, Kennedy outlived Bork long enough to retire on his own terms during a Republican presidency, so the result of his retirement will not be a change in the Court’s ideological balance – unless, that is, Trump nominates a new Justice even more conservative than Kennedy, which is obviously a strong possibility. But one person we can be sure Trump will not nominate in Merrick Garland, who never had a shot because he would most likely have joined his left-wing colleagues in disregarding the Constitution and the law in favor of desired left-wing outcomes. That’s exactly what we already have too much of on the Supreme Court.

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