CommentsPERSPECTIVE--I have profound respect for Trump and Senate Republicans.
Not because of their odious, hateful, and deliberately divisive policies, but because they know how to stick together to get their way. When, not if, but when SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed it will be near text book proof of their success in getting their way and the Democrats abysmal back door complicity in aiding and abetting Senate Republicans in getting their way.
Let’s start with the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and then work back. The hearings are a farce. The Senate Democrats on the committee could have trotted out the Senate committee rules book and cited the section that says the committee must have nine members and two members of the minority party i.e. Democrats to make a quorum to “transact business.” Senate Democrats on the committee could have invoked the rule and stayed away at least for the start of the hearings.
True, the committee would have met anyway, and would have bent the rules to justify the hearings and threatened to move the Kavanaugh nomination to a full Senate vote. But just the act of staying away at least for the start of the hearings would have been more than symbolism. It would have allowed the Senate Democrats to dramatically make the public case that the GOP has refused every effort for transparency on Kavanaugh by releasing tens of thousands of documents and materials from his days as a White House counsel to President W. Bush. It would have forced the GOP to fully explain why the documents weren’t released. It would have sent a strong public signal that the Senate Democrats are capable of doing what the GOP routinely does, and that’s stick together, while turning the tables and using the GOP’s tactics to mount a spirited and effectual opposition.
Instead, the Democrats dutifully showed up for the hearings start, in full pontificating mode, full of bombastic declarations of opposition to Kavanaugh, and pretended to talk tough to him on the issues.
This made for good theater and evening news sound bites. It meant absolutely nothing. Kavanaugh easily parried the bombast with the usual evasive, non-committal, and tell them what they want to hear answers that GOP SCOTUS nominees have been drilled in the art of evasion.
If that wasn’t farcical enough. Senate Ranking Committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein capped the sham performance by having the gall to apologize to the GOP for the disruptions by protesters with the groveling and infuriating, “I’m sorry we’ll get through this.” Who is “We”????
Feinstein and the Democrats cave-in ended there but it didn’t start there. The most recent ominous sign that beyond made-for-TV news rhetoric, the Senate Democrats didn’t have much real fight in the stop Kavanaugh campaign came when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer smiled and grinned a week before the start of the hearings with Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell. He agreed to stand aside and speed the confirmation of a slew of ultra-conservative Trump nominated judges to the federal bench.
Before that, Schumer’s predecessor then Senate Majority Leader Democrat Harry Reid in 2013 cut the deal with McConnell to scrap the filibuster for judicial nominations. The idea was to get then President Obama’s judicial nominees confirmed that the GOP had stonewalled. It was a bad deal. And GOP leaders told the Democrats of that at that time. They warned them that when they took back the Senate they’d use that against the Democrats up to and including extending it to a SCOTUS pick.
They gave a hard-nosed preview of that when they torpedoed Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the high court by simply refusing to hold any hearings on the nomination. The Democrats blustered, huffed and puffed, and screamed foul. But again, it was simply hot air for the cameras.
McConnell and the GOP further exposed the Senate Democrats feebleness when he summarily cut off debate with the so-called “nuclear option” on SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch and rammed his conformation through. There’s a lengthy checklist of things that the Senate Democrats could do to slow down the GOP juggernaut. They all involve making creative use of the Senate’s arcane and voluminous rules, and not just blustery speeches. The GOP has made masterful use of those rules when it suited it to block or stall an Obama nomination to the bench or an administration appointment during the years when it was the minority party in the Senate
The X factor in all of this is not the tactics the Democrats have at their disposal but the Democrats. A handful of Red State Democratic senators voted to confirm Gorsuch. And there is the likelihood that one or more may do the same again with Kavanaugh. Still, the GOP gave Democrats a template on how to use every Senate ploy to hector, harass, stall Trump’s SCOTUS nominee. They have failed miserably to use them. They just made defiant sounding speeches instead. The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings showed this. So, blame them not Trump or the GOP for the next SCOTUS Kavanaugh.
(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of the forthcoming The Kavanaugh Court (Amazon). He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network. Hutchinson is an occasional contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
