Elections have consequences … as the saying goes.
Nowhere are those consequences more significant, arguably, than on our judicial system. Which brings me to the point. The U.S. Supreme Court has suffered what I would call “collateral damage” from the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.
A nearly perfect jurist, Merrick Garland, waited in the wings for nine months after President Obama nominated him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Sadly, Garland’s political fate was sealed about an hour after Scalia’s death when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Senate would refuse to act on anyone Obama would choose for the nation’s highest court.
It was a shameful, reprehensible display of political gamesmanship and yet McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans had the temerity to accuse the president of playing politics.
McConnell took a huge gamble — and it paid off with Trump’s election this past month as president. Now the new president, a Republican, will get to nominate someone.
The New York Times editorialized Sunday that whoever joins the court will be sitting in a “stolen seat.” The Times, though, offers a pie-in-the-sky suggestion for Trump: He ought to renominate Garland, a brilliant centrist who Republicans once called a “consensus candidate” when he was being considered for the Supreme Court back in 2010.
That won’t happen.
Trump, though, could pick another centrist when the time comes for him to make his selection, the Times suggested. Frankly, I’m not at all confident he’ll do that, either. Indeed, with Trump one is hard-pressed to be able to gauge the ideology tilt of whomever he’ll select, given the president-elect’s own lack of ideological identity.
Scalia was a conservative icon and a man revered by the far right within the Republican Party. His death has put the conservatives’ slim majority on the court in jeopardy. But, hey, it happens from time to time.
President Obama sought to fulfill his constitutional duty by appointing someone to the nation’s highest court. The Senate — led by McConnell and his fellow Republican obstructionists — failed miserably in fulfilling their own duty by giving a highly qualified court nominee the full hearing he deserved.
Now we will get to see just how consequential the 2016 presidential election is on our nation’s triple-tiered system of government.
Will the new president administer some kind of conservative “litmus test” to whomever he chooses? Or will he look for someone who — like Judge Merrick Garland — has exhibited the kind of judicial temperament needed on the highest court in America?
I fear the worst.
