Donald Trump won just under 46 percent of the popular vote and 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. And Judge Gorsuch was confirmed by a vote of 54-45. According to Kevin McMahon of Trinity College, who wrote all this up this year in his paper “Will the Supreme Court Still ‘Seldom Stray Very Far’?: Regime Politics in a Polarized America,” the 54 senators who voted to elevate Judge Gorsuch had received around 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million. That’s 58 percent to 42 percent.
And if the Senate confirms Brett Kavanaugh soon, the vote is likely to fall along similar lines, meaning that we will soon have two Supreme Court justices who deserve to be called “minority-majority”: justices who are part of a five-vote majority on the bench but who were nominated and confirmed by a president and a Senate who represent the will of a minority of the American people.
And consider this further point. Two more current members of the dominant conservative bloc, while nominated by presidents who did win the popular vote, were confirmed by senators who collectively won fewer popular votes than the senators who voted against them.
Mike, or course, can't help but reveal the real reason for his feigned concern. A reliably leftist bastion is about to fall.
The real explanation, of course, is quite different. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not nominate jurists who had left paper trails of judicial extremism or dropped other hints that their jurisprudence would be radical.
Republican presidents have. None more so than Mr. Trump, who seems to have outsourced the judicial-selection process to right-wing groups like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation and twice nominated judges with an eye cast largely toward how happy they would make conservative evangelicals.
Or serious Roman Catholics. But here's where we are. Dred Scott did not affect the Supreme Court's legitimacy in the slightest. Neither did Plessy v. Ferguson. Neither did Roe v. Wade, in which the Court invented a "right" to kill babies and overthrew democratically-passed laws from one end of this country to the other.
But legally-elected US presidents legally nominating Supreme Court candidates and seeing those candidates legally approved suddenly constitutes a "crisis?" Really? Then here's what you do, Mike. Only thing you can do, really.
Get to work amending the US Constitution. I admit it'll be tough for people like you, what with not having a court to instantly impose your will on the entire country, having to actually convince people you hate of the correctness of your views and having to actually visit US states you'd rather not think about and interact with state legislators you hold in contempt.
But if you somehow manage to pull all that off, people like me won't have a legitimate complaint. If you don't want to have to go through all that, then there is one other option.
Shutting the hell up.
2 comments:
This whole "the Constitution was written for the benefit slave-holders and is un-democratic" idea is starting to take hold in way too many ill-informed minds. The rest of us need to keep our guard up.
ur, those ignorant minds always forget, or forget to mention, the little facts about the amendments to the Constitution outlawing involuntary servitude and guaranteeing citizenship and equal rights. The amendments, the first ten and all the others, are just as much part of the Constitution as was the original three-fifths compromise required to get some of the states to sign on.
Chris, gotta love how this fool at the NY Times thinks the nominations of an Episcopalian and a Roman Catholic are just the ticket to the hearts of "conservative evangelicals." As Mike Tomasky's recent Dear Leader said, elections have consequences. Tomasky also conveniently forgets that Bill Clinton never got a majority of the votes cast, either. His wife followed him in that, but she didn't pay attention to the Electoral College, which Bill did.
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