The Republican Gamble that Keeps on Giving

The brewing showdown over the next SCOTUS justice has been a long time coming

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Owen Tendrich | Contributing Writer

It is 2009.

President Barack Obama is sitting in a closed door meeting with House Republicans, including then-House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, who are seeking to negotiate with the newly elected president regarding the details of his desired stimulus package. Many believe that these meetings could be the beginning of a new age of bipartisan cooperation in Washington.

President Obama utters the famous (or infamous) words: “Elections have consequences. And at the end of the day, I won. So I think on that one, I trump you.”

President Obama was obviously criticized for injecting childlike arrogance into a previously hopeful atmosphere, but he was all too right. Elections do have consequences. Tremendous, paradigm-shifting, generational consequences that have the potential to alter the arc of history.

Just one of these many consequences is the duty of the president to appoint justices to the Supreme Court.

On June 27th, 2018, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. This gives current President Trump the opportunity to nominate his second Supreme Court justice. Immediately, Democrats went into meltdown mode. “Anthony Kennedy, how dare you retire from the Supreme Court now, allowing an illegitimate monster like Trump to replace you,” one Twitter user exclaimed. “All you had to do was wait until November. You just killed America, you a**hole.”

Now, the casual political observer would be wise to dismiss this rhetoric as pure partisan banter. Yet, there is an entire backstory to the SCOTUS saga that goes back some two years.

Following the sudden passing of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Obama nominated Circuit Judge Merrick Garland to fill his seat. Garland, though relatively moderate, would have still swung the Court’s ideological balance to the Left.

Senate Republicans objected, citing the fact that 2016 was an election year and the right thing to do would be to let the American people decide who they wanted to appoint the next Supreme Court justice at the ballot boxes in November. Thus, Garland’s nomination expired with the Obama presidency.

Now, here we are in 2018, where the Left is screaming bloody murder at what they see as Republican hypocrisy at its finest.

This hyper-partisanship that now surrounds the Supreme Court is horrifying. The Supreme Court was intended to be an independent, impartial bulwark against injustice committed by the other branches of government. The sole purpose of the Supreme Court is to take the Constitution as it stands and apply it.

Judicial activism thus has no place in the highest court in the land. What’s even more alarming? The lack of civic knowledge among our citizens, media talking-heads, and, yes, even our politicians. The Constitution specifically tasks the Senate with the approval of Supreme Court nominees. This means that the Senate, for whatever reasons they may deem necessary, can approve or reject a nominee.

Now, should anyone have believed that Mitch McConnell was making a principled, virtuous stand for democratic principles when he said “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice”? Absolutely not! McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans had a majority in the Senate and thus had the right and responsibility to act how they saw fit. McConnell had the right cards in his hand at the right time, and he was going to play them.

Should anyone believe that Senate Democrats would have behaved differently if placed in the exact same situation? Of course not! Why? We’ve seen already how the democrats look at rules as mere obstacles rather than as institutions that should be valued for their own sake. After all, without Democrats, none of this would have been possible.

In 2013, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “went nuclear” and eliminated the 60 vote threshold for non-Supreme Court judicial nominees. This is all the justification that McConnell and Senate Republicans needed to break some rules of their own and do the same for Supreme Court nominees.

Both sides need to stop spamming the “hypocrite” button. Pointing out hypocrisy is a great way to score cheap political points, whether that be on your Great-Aunt’s daily Facebook political rant or in the halls of Congress. But it is a two-way street. Democrats called Republicans hypocrites for their support of the appointment of Kennedy’s replacement, but their opposition to the appointment (or they say, even the consideration) of Garland. But couldn’t Republicans just as easily call Democrats hypocrites for vice versa?

Winston Churchill’s timeless saying that “History is written by the victors” couldn’t have a better application than the U.S. Congress. American politics is a contentious, cut-throat game of chess: and the Democrats just got checkmated.

Owen Tendrich is a sophomore at the University of Central Florida majoring in political science. Feeling a calling to politics from a very early age, Tendrich took up the task of solely representing right wing political views on his high school newspaper. Tendrich is now dedicated to providing a voice to like minded students whose political views may not be treated with much respect in the college environment.