Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died February 13, 2016. On March 16, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s vacant seat.
At the time, Senate Republicans continued their then-7-year-long strategy of refusing to do their jobs. They decided it was better to sabotage the Supreme Court for 11 months and place their hopes in winning the White House and the ability to pick a right-wing justice to fill Scalia’s vacancy. Keep in mind this was after numerous Republican senators had publicly stated that Merrick Garland was probably the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court.
With donald trump’s electoral victory, Senate Republicans celebrated their good fortune and began salivating at the thought that a president trump would nominate a sufficiently deplorable right-winger willing to gut women’s reproductive rights, marriage equality, and reverse various other advances we’ve made as a society in the past 50 years.
Many Democratic supporters hoped that elected Democrats have learned their lesson regarding their pathological rolling over for right-wing complainers and getting absolutely nothing in return. This means that Senate Democrats are now expected by their supporters to return the favor and block every Supreme Court nomination made by president trump.
This did not sit well with some of the very Senate Republicans who declared they had no intention of even holding hearings for any Obama nominee.
Read this statement from Mitch McConnell’s senate office from March 16, 2016:
“The leader [McConnell] reiterated his position that the American people will have a voice in this vacancy and that the Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the person the next president nominates. And since the Senate will not be acting on this nomination, he would not be holding a perfunctory meeting, but he wished Judge Garland well.”
That meant that McConnell made it clear that Republicans would not allow any nominee by President Obama to be confirmed.
Now that Democrats are singing a similar tune with regards to any president trump nominees, McConnell has changed his tune about senate inaction on Supreme Court nominees. Here’s what McConnell said today:
“Apparently there’s yet a new standard now, which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all. I think that’s something the American people simply will not tolerate, and we’ll be looking forward to receiving a Supreme Court nomination and moving forward on it.”
My, what a difference a year, and a partisan election, makes.
Meanwhile, in news that doesn’t matter…
Chris Brown and Soulja Boy don’t like each other, according to their tweets. They earned the distinction of sparking the first celebrity feud of 2017.