Make the Judiciary Great Again by Holding Senators Accountable
Every vote from the Supreme Court’s justices on hot-button issues needs to become a political issue for the senators who voted for those justices.
He is Risen! This Lent was wonderful. Thank you for your prayers. It’s good to be back. Please enjoy my thoughts on how to build a judiciary faithful to the Founders’ design. — DAK
Following four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late March, the full Senate voted 53-47 last week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Supreme Court—fulfilling Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to name a black woman to the high court. Three Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to confirm Jackson—Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Utah’s Mitt Romney.
Imagine a slightly different scenario: a Republican president nominates someone to serve on the Supreme Court and asks a 50-50 Senate to confirm that person. You can be absolutely sure that Democrats would force the vice president to break the tie to get that nominee on the bench. Remember when, in 2016, President Trump nominated Betsy Devos to be secretary of education and Vice President Mike Pence had to break a tie, even without an evenly split Senate?
Democrats understand politics. They wouldn’t care if the confirmation was supposedly “inevitable”—they would fight tooth and nail to stop it, as they did with Brett Kavanaugh. And if they couldn’t succeed, they certainly wouldn’t be caught dead lending that razor-thin outcome even a shred of bipartisan legitimacy.
But not Republicans. Oh, no. They’re far too genteel, far too principled, really, to engage in such loathsome hardball.
In the post-Kavanaugh era, we need a new approach to Supreme Court nominations.
Read the rest at American Greatness.
Make the Judiciary Great Again by Holding Senators Accountable
Welcome back, Deion! And what a way to return. I like this idea a lot; GOP congressmen regularly tell us that the judiciary is what really matters, but too often fail to act as though that is the case. If we are going to let them off the hook for, by way of example, not passing a law prohibiting abortion, on the basis that the judiciary has tied their hands, then let's hold them accountable for who they elevate to that judiciary. I hope whoever runs against Romney in his primary sees your article.
Hear hear! There's been a gradual self-purification process going on in the GOP for years now. Let's take it to the next level by ridding ourselves of Murkowski in 2022 and Romney in 2024 -- but let's still use them as best we can in the Senate in the meantime.