When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the question on millions of people’s minds was not a matter of if Mitch McConnell would attempt to shove through a nominee before the election, but just how shameless he would be in doing so. And it turned out the answer was: pretty freaking shameless! Before RBG’s body was even cold, the Senate majority leader, who blocked a vote on Merrick Garland about nine months before the 2016 election, said he would quickly move to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg. Rewriting the arbitrary rule he came up with to block Barack Obama’s replacement for Antonin Scalia, the senator from Kentucky attempted to cast his reversal not as wildly hypocritical—which of course it is—but as the fulfillment of a promise to the American people. “In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016,” McConnell wrote in a statement, “Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise.”
Rewind to 2016 and that’s not what McConnell said at the time—only that it was necessary to delay Garland’s nomination because voters should get to decide, therefore it would only be fair to wait until the next president was installed. (Perhaps the majority leader is referring to the unspoken promise he made, which was to fuck over Democrats from here to eternity and bury small d democracy in a shallow grave. In that case, yeah, he kept his promise!) If the whole thing wasn’t so evil it would almost be impressive. “No, no, we didn’t say you couldn’t put someone on the Supreme Court in an election year. What we said was you couldn’t do it when Mercury was in retrograde, there was a full moon the night the departing justice died, and I was just sitting down to a heaping bowl of Fiber One when I got the call. Those conditions are different this time, so it’s okay.”
On Monday, apparently to give the nation a preview of the stomach-churning hypocrisy he’ll be engaging in over the next 42 days (and, obviously, for the rest of his time in Congress), McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to declare that while he is leading the party trying to steal a second seat on the Supreme Court, it’s the Democrats who are engaging in the kinds of underhanded maneuvers that he just won’t stand for.
“President Trump’s nominee for this vacancy will receive a vote on the floor of the Senate,” McConnell said, his neck pouch quivering with faux outrage. “Now already some of the same individuals who tried every conceivable dirty trick to obstruct Justice [Neil] Gorsuch and Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh are lining up, lining up to proclaim the third time will be the charm. The American people are about to witness an astonishing parade of misrepresentations about the past, misstatements about the present, and more threats against our institutions from the same people—the same people—who’ve already been saying for months—well before this—that they want to pack the court.”
On the matter of Gorsuch, McConnell will have to forgive people if they were still just a touch bitter about his decision to block Obama’s nominee almost 300 days before another president took office. As for Kavanaugh, it’s not actually a dirty trick to vigorously oppose a man credibly accused of sexual assault, who suggested the investigation into his conduct was a Democratic conspiracy, for a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the country. Meanwhile, expanding the Supreme Court has been floated as a reaction to Republicans’ highjacking of SCOTUS. As for threats against our institutions? They’re definitely coming fast and furiously, but not from the people McConnell suspects!