What's his name again? Obama's pick for the seat on the Supreme Court that Republicans are holding open for President Trump to fill. I think it's Merrick Garland. Suppose he doesn't make it onto the Supreme Court. Will it be on account of Republicans never giving him a hearing and a vote? Or is it more likely that Hillary Clinton wins the Presidency in a landslide and, since the election has also given Democrats a majority in the Senate, withdraws the cerebral centrist Garland and nominates . . . I don't know, there must be a handful of female Ivy League law professors with big Afros and views to the left of Elizabeth Warren's from which to choose. For the purposes of this argument, Elizabeth Warren herself would do.
What would the residue of Republicans in the Senate--let us say, a filibuster-able minority--do? They've been saying, since Scalia's corpse was 96°F., that "the next President should fill the opening on the Supreme Court." Well, Clinton would be that next President. To some of us, it doesn't seem that Republican senators would be in a good place to block her nominee on the ground that she was "playing politics with the Supreme Court." As a definition of chutzpah, that would surpass "killing your parents and then pleading for mercy on the ground that you've been cruelly orphaned."
I'm not saying that, in the event, Clinton should or would follow such a course. To do so would require the kind of reckless spite that characterizes not her but Donald Trump.
Comments