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Democrats and the Constitution: I do not think it means what they think it means…
The Constitutional procedure for filling a vacancy in the Supreme Court is quite simple: The President has the right to pick a nominee. He doesn’t have to, and he can pick anyone that he wants. The nominee may not serve unless confirmed by the Senate (with a recess appointment exception, I think, not applicable here). There is nothing in the Constitution that says that the Senate has to confirm, or even that the Senate has to vote.
As such, the President has unfettered discretion to nominate a prospective Justice, and the Senate has unfettered discretion to approve, or not.
But if we listen to the Democrats, the rules are different.
According to the Democrats, if a Democratic President nominates a prospective Justice during an election year, the Senate must vote. On the other hand, if a Republican President nominates a prospective Justice during an election year, the Senate must not vote.
There is an unstated implication, perhaps, that these odd rules only apply when Republicans control the Senate.
This might explain their attachment to the strange idea of a living Constitution. Apparently, to a Democrat, the Constitution means just whatever they want it to mean at the moment. Because if they don’t get their way, it’s unfair and unjust and just plain terrible. And that must be unconstitutional, mustn’t it?
Would I be out of line to point out that I’ve seen this type of behavior before? I’ve had a 4-year-old — four times in fact, and I know what a tantrum looks like.
It might seem strange that voters would fail to see through such transparently childish arguments. But then, as I posted last week, only 36% of Americans can pass the citizenship test, and among young voters (under 45), who tend to favor the Democrats, only 19% can pass the citizenship test.
Oh, did I mention that according to the Democrats, we’re the hypocrites?
BLM delenda est. Antifa delenda est.
Published in Law
The Senate has a recess scheduled for October 9.
The Democrats who do understand the Constitution don’t really support what it says, means, and stands for. That explains why the young people don’t even have knowledge of the Constitution because the Democrats have a lock on public education and they don’t teach it.
The Constitution is a historic relic of a by gone era. Other than be a curiosity and an occasional use when the powerful wishes to twist law to their will it is just a bunch of old paper.
I don’t get why when the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself!) get upset it is a crisis and suddenly Republicans have to make deals with them and give up all sorts of normal procedural benefits that come with having the Senate and the Presidency; but when Republicans get upset… “The country is changing! Get over it!”
I mean, I get it. But it is weird to see some people who claim to be conservative taking that same position.
Well said. It’s just a shame that it has to be said.
Yes, though I’m disappointed in the number of Republicans that are are contradicting their earlier statements as well. I guess this is unavoidable. When one side lies, cheats, and steals with impunity (abetted by an allied media) it becomes untenable for the other side to not resort to the same tactics. This is especially true when each and every election is billed as the most important election ever. Desperate times call for desperate measures — so let’s manufacture some desperation to justify our misdeeds.
Interesting times.
You missed Article III Section 4.
You know, ” the dying wish of the deceased member of the Supreme Court shall determine the timing and method of choosing their replacement”.
Merrick Garland was denied a SCOTUS seat under the Constitution. The Senate refused to Consent. Nothing in the Constitution required a hearing before refusal to consent.
The Senate again will have the right to act or not act under the Constitution.
All the arguments four years ago and now about whether the Senate should act are nothing but hot air for public consumption. Neither side looks good when they make those arguments and then reverse themselves four years later. Both sides are doing it. No one’s star is shining on the reversals of positions. Only the Constitution matters.
It right up there with a poem on a statue overrides immigration law.
The whole Garland thing was a sorry stunt. Had they voted, and had Garland not been approved, Hillary would have put forward a different person, someone more to the left. They all thought Hillary would win. It was really a fight over whether Obama or Hillary would pick who would fill the seat since they were so cocksure she would win. For Obama, it was win-win, either he would fill the seat or have a talking point to use against a Trump. They used Garland then and continue to use him now. In opinions, there was only a 7% difference between Garland and Kavanaugh on their court yet Kavanaugh was the devil himself when he was nominated. I don’t buy the hypocrisy argument. Both sides used tools at their disposal to game the system, system that wouldn’t have to be gamed if the left didn’t politicize the Judicial Branch so much. I have no charitable feelings toward them and would be happy if they went straight to a floor vote, whose outcome is predetermined. Hearings are just an international embarrassment.
President John Tyler did not get along with the Senate. They did not confirm three or four of his nominees!
John Marshall was appointed by lame duck John Adams in 1801 after he had lost to Jefferson. What is your point?
The differences in interpretation of the purpose and meaning of the Constitution lives in the legacies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Sometimes these differences are described using the terms positive rights or negative rights, meaning expansive government actions on behalf of the people or restraint on government to insure individual liberty.
History, how it is recorded and how it is taught, affects this process. I am almost wholly self-taught in history, meaning most of what I think I know has come to me by what I have chosen to study. I had a chance recently to open a volume from a five book set published sometime in the mid-20th century (I don’t have this available this moment). It was a set that included Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Anti-Federalist Papers, and Democracy in America. There was an introduction to the set (can’t cite who wrote that) pointing out that none of these works had been used in most college course work taught in the 1920’s, a prosperous economic period preceding the Great Depression. He said he hadn’t known that fact for a long time and I didn’t know that either. If true, which I have no reason to doubt, it shows that what is going on now in our education process is not all new. So there have been periods in our history when our history was not taught to our young people.
We’re still here.
Also next to the Abortion emanation and the Gay marriage clause.
Four years ago the President was a Democrat and the GOP controlled the Senate. There was a deadlock. True, Garland was much more moderate than the justices Obama nominated when his own party controlled the Senate, but still hardly the sort of originalist the Republicans would have preferred. In that context the “let’s wait until after the election” argument made sense: you want X, we want Y, let’s let the people decide.
I don’t really think it’s a reversal to go ahead with a confirmation now when the Senate and White House are controlled by the same party. There’s no deadlock to resolve here, so why wait?
Think hard about why this is different from the Obama/Garland case.. Any sitting President is going to nominate a person for a Supreme Court vacancy. Why would a Senate majority of the same Party as the President have a confrontation with the President of their Party by taking an opposing position, and just before an election.
The Democrats certainly live up to their name. If we left it up to them, they would leave everything to popular democracy:
I think it’s important that we get rid of the word “democracy” where applicable. It’s used far too often in schools and in the media. I was guilty of doing this for a long time as well, until I smartened up. What’s the old quote about democracy? “Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner.”
I would be shocked to learn that (at a bare minimum) the Federalist papers wasn’t taught in college in the 1920s.
Unless the colleges of the time assumed that it had already been well-covered in High School.
I think helps that the schools do a good job of teaching ambition, distraction, uglification and derision, too.
When someone tells me about the Living Constitution, I respond that yes, the Constitution is living in the sense that it can grow. Provision is made for the addition of amendments. The Constitution has been amended—has grown—many times over the past two and a half (gettin’ there) centuries. There is no need for SCOTUS to look for emanations and penumbras; if Americans wish to include, within the Constitution, an amendment that says that women have the absolute right to kill their babies up to or beyond birth, or an Amendment that says we all have an absolute right to the services of doctors and nurses, including to alter our bodies so as to resemble the opposite sex, no sex, or a bagel-with-lox, that can happen.
Or we can just go ahead and appoint people clever enough to rule all of us just beautifully, without the need for all this fiddly, boring dialectic, debate, voting and so on.
Exactly.
I mean, we* amended the Constitution to ban alcohol. Not just pass legislation. Because people at the time understood that without the amendment it wasn’t one of the national governments powers.
*and by “we” I mean the “progressives”. They’re the ones who pushed prohibition. Not the mean-spirited hateful Conservatives.
Mark the Progressive Era as 1890-1920. In 1890 slightly more than 3% of 18-21 year-olds were in college. In 1920 that number was over 12%. We had just had a decade when the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th amendments became part of the Constitution and communism was in flower. The college curriculum might have suffered in ways similar to today.
Along those lines, in a recent article a reporter tried to explain that an “originalist” is a judge who believes the Constitution should be interpreted as the Founding Fathers intended. Besides being an oversimplification, that only applies to the original articles of the Constitution that are still in force. When interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments for instance, it’s the original intent of the Congress of the 1860’s that matters, and that overrides the views of the Founders on slavery, voting rights, citizenship, and other key questions.
Football , when you control the ball late in the game you can score if need be (2020) or kneel on the ball (2016) all understand this. It’s not considered ‘unfair’. Democrats and media always expect Republicans to cede their advantage and often they can con them into doing it, as in Sessions recusal in favor of Rosenstein.