Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) triggered some Democrats when he blocked Merrick Garland, a US Supreme Court nominee, from getting a hearing under former President Barack Obama during the 2016 election year, and he said he will do it all over again in 2024 if the Republicans take back the majority in the Senate in 2022.
He said that the Democrats would do the same thing, and he’s 100 percent right. Everything Democrats try to shame Republicans for doing are thing they have already done themselves. They just rely on a boot-licking sycophantic media to cover it up for them.
McConnell served as the Senate Majority Leader from 2015 to 2021 and drew the ire of many Democrats and leftists when he would not allow a confirmation hearing for Garland when President Barack Obama nominated him to replace the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia. That, to Republicans, would have been as much a sharp stick in the eye as it was to Democrats when President Donald Trump replaced the late, great Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
In fact, Democrats screamed bloody hell when Justice Ginsburg died and Trump nominated Barrett all in an election year and McConnell said he would give her a confirmation hearing. Democrats cried foul. They cried hypocrisy. They cried it was unfair. They just cried. White papers were written. Little McConnell voodoo dolls were handed out with sharp pins, and a national seance took place to summon Saul Alinsky’s spirit from the grave. But to no avail, because the senator from Kentucky stuck to his guns.
Here’s the little secret that the Democrats and their friends in the media will never tell you. You have to go back to the 19th century to find the last time that the US Senate gave a confirmation hearing to a judicial nominee for the High Court during an election year when the president’s party did not match the party of the majority in the Senate.
“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled,” McConnell said on Monday in an interview with radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. “So I think it’s highly unlikely — in fact, no, I don’t think either party if it controlled, if it were different from the president, would confirm a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of an election.”
There was a reason for this way of doing things. The belief is that if in an election year the president’s party matches that of the majority party in the US Senate then it is considered that the American people have already decided who they want to put judges on the Supreme Court. However, if the president’s party does not match the majority party in the US Senate, then it is believed that the American people are yet undecided, and they should be allowed to decide in the upcoming election which party should be the one to place people on the Courts. It makes sense but only to Democrats when it works in their favor.
And the Democrats do understand this because when George HW Bush was President, and he had 18 months left of his term in office, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee got up and gave a speech where he said that the American people should decide who gets to place people on the High Court. He went on to say that his committee would not consider any nominations for the rest of Bush’s term. It wasn’t even an election year when he said but every Democrat went along with it. The chairman of that Judiciary Committee who made that speech was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. That new rule then became known as the “Biden Rule,” but Joe Biden acted like he had no idea what people were talking about when they mentioned it to him at the time when Merrick Garland was nominated for the Court. He and every other Democrat acted as if the Biden Rule never existed.
On that knowledge, Hewitt asked McConnell if he would block a Biden Supreme Court nominee if he was Senate Majority Leader again in 2023, a non-election year. The Kentucky Republican responded, “we’d have to see what happens.” He probably would allow it, because, unlike the Democrats, McConnell may be a lot of things but he’s not a hypocrite when it comes to Senate rules.
McConnell got three Supreme Court Justices nominated by Trump to the High Court, making the court 5-4 Constitutional majority. Some say the court is 6-3, but I do not count Chief Justice John Roberts as a Constitutional conservative. He is with the Left on the Court.
