'Had Republicans not obstinately blocked Obama’s own supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016, the choice of Kavanaugh would be less consequential. Garland, an eminently qualified centrist, would be concluding his second year as an associate justice on the supreme court. A progressive-centrist majority of Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Garland would now control the court.
Instead, we are now looking at the five-man majority of Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. This will constitute the most conservative bloc of justices since the early years of the Roosevelt administration, when a hidebound group of justices struck down crucial pieces of New Deal legislation designed to ease the suffering of millions during the Great Depression.
Anchoring this conservative bloc is Thomas, less a jurist than a rigid and embittered ideologue who seems to carry a personal grudge against progressive causes; and Alito, a small-minded jurist whose opinions show more concern with the social ostracism endured by conservatives than with hatred directed against gay couples.
Trump will take the bows for this sharp rightward swing, but the credit belongs to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It was McConnell who, in the days after the death of Antonin Scalia, engineered the ploy to deny Judge Garland a hearing and so upended the constitutional process by which the president nominates persons to the supreme court. Having abandoned all pretense of principled governance, McConnell dared voters to make him and his party pay a political price for this act of constitutional defiance. Instead he was handsomely rewarded with a president he holds in contempt but sees as a useful vehicle for transforming the federal judiciary.'
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.I think the strategy of naming the youngest judges possible could backfire though. Some of the most liberal judges in history started out as young conservatives.
Seminarian
Level 7
July 10, 2018
1
We live in hope 
Someone wrote elsewhere (I haven't been able to verify the comment) that the last time that a Republican-controlled senate approved a SCOTUS nominee of a Democratic president was around 1895. The light at the end of the tunnel in all this is that the Republicans didn't even expect to win in 2016 and are reportedly prepared to lose power for a long time, a very long time, in the near future.
shayne69
Level 6
July 10, 2018
0
McConnell is also a pOS. Fuhrer Trump and him must be related.
sassygirl3869
Level 9
July 10, 2018
2
There is no point in rehashing what happened in the past. You can analyse ad nauseum it will not make a jot of difference to what is happening in the here and now. What ifs seem pointless to me, get out and try to change things now so that tomorrow will be better. Change is only effected when enough people care enough to make it change. Civil rights for instance had to be fought for.
Marionville
Level 10
July 10, 2018
0
Santayana's words are as relevant today as ever. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Understanding how we came to this point is a vital part of changing the future course. The Republicans have a propaganda smog machine which excels at rewriting history to put the blame on everyone but themselves. It's more important now than ever before (which is saying a LOT) to know how we got here, so we can get out.
@Paul4747 I do understand that you have to remember the past in order not to repeat it. Unfortunately we often don’t seem to learn. The point I was trying to make was in order to effect change you have to do more than just wish things had happened differently, but actively go out and try to change things so that next time the result is different .
The root cause of the problem is America’s bipartisan politics, which would only ever be resolved by electoral reform, and I don’t see the two big parties voting to make themselves less influential. It’s a deadlock in the evolutionary process of the political system. Sad.
Denker
Level 7
July 10, 2018
0
Spot on. McConnell was frustrated in his stated goal of making Obama a "one-term President". Even in Obama's first term McConnell set a course of doing everything possible to frustrate the Democrat agenda and make it impossible to compile a record of achievements, thus keeping the economy as slow as possible and preparing the field for a Republican victory in 2012. When that failed, he simply, bitterly, refused to accept the will of the people and saw it as his role to frustrate Obama by any means possible.
Even G. W. Bush was accorded more respect by the Democrats as to the prerogatives of his office than was Obama by Republicans, who frequently treated Obama with open, public contempt. That should have been no surprise to anyone who paid attention during Clinton's presidency, though, when the Democrat was accused of being a rapist, a murderer, and an incompetent by Republicans on their flagship cable network, night after night. Yet any criticism of a Republican is "liberal bias". And so it goes...
Paul4747
Level 8
July 10, 2018
3
You are exactly (and sadly) on the money.
@moNOtheist
Historian and liberal. A dangerous combination. I remember things.
@Paul4747 You and me both, sir, I'm happy to say
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