Democrats and Joe Biden hardly had time to celebrate the reassuring performance of the former vice president in the most recent town hall (televised town hall). The media had not finished highlighting his energy and mastery of his cases when the death of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg was announced.
If President Trump highlighted the disappearance of a colossus of Law, a fighter and a brilliant mind, the leader of the Republican majority in the Senate was quick to point out that he was waiting for a nomination from the president, while assuring that he would promptly ask for confirmation.
The life and work of Justice Ginsburg certainly deserved a longer break from partisan politics, but with less than two months to go before the Nov. 3 election, Republicans owe it to themselves to act quickly. It is not impossible that they will lose both the presidency and the majority in the Senate. If we want to increase the number of more conservative Supreme Court judges, they must act now.
The US president has every right to act quickly on this issue and Republican senators still have a slim majority. So why have the Democrats been screaming for two days? Quite simply because under the Obama administration, the Republicans invented a rule which is not a rule to block the nomination of Merrick Garland, the candidate of Barack Obama to succeed the conservative Antonin Scalia.
Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues argued that a judge cannot be appointed in the last year of a presidential term. For almost a whole year, we refused to study Garland’s case.
Hypocrisy is blatant less than 50 days before the vote. I can well think that they would act in the same way in the opposite situation, the Democrats thus go up to the barricades to denounce the deception and one emerges the many statements of senators who must now contradict themselves.
Besides a call for a lack of morality, what can Democrats do? Both a little and a lot. If, as was the case during the vote on the impeachment issue of Donald Trump, a sufficient number of Republicans support the presidential candidate, the die will be cast.
As of yesterday, however, a few Democrats have posed far more serious threats than what Joe Biden and his strategists refer to. If we go ahead, it will be one of the most violent chapters of the political war between the two parties.
Since the Democrats do not hope to block a quick nomination, they are dangling their opponents with what a Democratic victory for the presidency and the Senate majority could represent.
Thus, they say they envisage the end of the filibuster (parliamentary obstruction of the minority), the addition of two new states to the American union (Washington DC and Puerto Rico favor the Democrats, therefore four more senators) and a modification of the number total number of Supreme Court judges.
Other changes could be added to those I just listed, but I wanted to highlight the most important. It is not impossible that these threats could materialize, but the exercise would be perilous. Not only are the Democrats revealing their game very quickly, but we would further distort a system developed around the notion of compromise.
Whenever we wonder if the situation can deteriorate even more or if we believe we are done with surprises, the news is in charge of providing us with new examples of issues around which we no longer manage to get along.
For the period that separates us from the vote of November 3, let’s forget about ethics, morals and the main principles. In this extreme sport that is American politics, all shots are allowed and the referees have put away their whistles.