Friday, May 31, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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President Donald Trump is a casual and constant liar, but he’s hardly the only one within the Republican Party.
This has become indisputable in recent years as the GOP has denied flagrant gerrymandering, voter suppression and election-rigging, then tried to downplay scorched-earth legislation to limit the powers of incoming Democratic governors in some states when Republicans couldn’t win elections by cooking or breaking the rules.
And now comes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s announcement this week that he would help Trump fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court even if it were to occur in 2020. That statement reveals how glibly he lied in 2016 when he blocked confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, citing the need to “give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy.”
That was an obvious falsehood back then, as McConnell clearly wasn’t basing his obstruction on any sort of democratic principal but rather on partisan politics.
To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Senate welcoming nominees in any year of a president’s administration. There never was. We’ve done it throughout our nation’s history, and that’s the way it should remain.
So in steering back from his 2016 lie, McConnell reveals his core identity — a cynical hack.
But there’s much more to the story than a hypocritical politician engaging in party shenanigans.
McConnell has led a years-long campaign to stack the courts with conservative judges, and in doing so undermine one of the underpinnings of our democracy. And his actions related to the Supreme Court are just the tip of the iceberg.
Through obstructionism during the Obama administration, McConnell paved the way for Trump to enter office with more than 100 vacancies in lower courts, including 17 on U.S. appellate courts.
There’s always been gamesmanship with judicial nominees, but McConnell took it to new levels. His tactics included filibusters and sweating senators into withholding their so-called “blue slip” privileges, which traditionally allowed the two senators from a nominee’s state to fast-track confirmation. Then, of course, there was his stiff-arming of Garland.
Now, with all of those positions to fill and more coming, McConnell and the Senate have abandoned any pretense of filling the vacancies with impartial, fair-minded jurists. Their strategy instead is to stack the courts with conservative extremists, with a long-term goal of being able to beat back moderate or progressive policies through the legal system for decades to come.
It’s all about turning the courts into an ideological arm of the party, eroding the judiciary’s independence and weakening it as a branch of our democracy.
Meanwhile, the changes threaten to have profound effects on the lives of Americans. The lower and appellate courts rule on tens of thousands of cases per year, and they’re often the final rulings in those matters — the Supreme Court accepts fewer than 100 cases annually on average.
So women, LGBTQ Americans, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants and other groups stand to be profoundly affected if the courts reverse decades of precedent on gender rights, civil rights, immigration policy, etc.
One example: The same courts that have struck down gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts in a number of states could well uphold future cases involving those issues, robbing millions of Americans of the right to vote and allowing Republicans to establish a one-party system.
Given what’s at stake, McConnell’s switcheroo is anything but a trivial or laughing matter. Rather, it’s an unabashed acknowledgment of an attempt to hijack the courts.
Meanwhile, it also shows how eagerly Republicans and their media partner, Fox News, are tearing at the fabric of this nation by lying about what they’re doing and misleading the public about what the “issues” are. It also reveals thewillingness of some Americans to accept whatever they’re hearing as long as it supports their agenda.
Truly, in the end, McConnell and his ilk are the ones taking a wrecking ball to American institutions — even the idea of America — in a purely craven power grab.
For anyone outside the minority of extremists who make up Trump’s base, it’s critical to keep this issue top of mind during the 2020 election.
