Tag: Mitch McConnell

The political calculus: Who SHOULD be the Supreme Court nominee?

Second in a series of posts about the politics of filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In an earlier post, I attempted to flesh out the political landscape surrounding any potential Supreme Court nomination. With President Trump announcing his plan to name a nominee at the end of this week, I now turn to whom he should nominate from a strategic standpoint.

I note at the outset that this is a question of politics, not whether the nominee is necessarily the best fit for the Court. While all the likely nominees are well-qualified on paper, the President’s calculus is not (nor has it ever been) about the Court’s best interests. It is about making political hay. And that is the lens through which I approach the question.

I also leave aside the question of whether the President should decline to send a nomination until after the election. That is, of course, the overarching partisan game, which I explored previously. I assume here that the President will make a nomination within the timeline he has provided, that Senator Mitch McConnell will do everything he can to bring that nomination to a vote before November, and that Senate Democrats will do everything in their power to avoid that vote.

With that in mind, the most conventionally strategic nominee is Sixth Circuit judge Joan Larsen. As I have detailed elsewhere, Judge Larsen is a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and well-qualified judge from Michigan, a political swing state which will play a big role in the upcoming Presidential election. Beyond her qualifications, her nomination poses practical problems for Democrats, who do not want to be seen as opposing a female nominee — especially one who sailed through the Senate just three years ago when she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Larsen is also popular among voters in her home state, where she was resoundingly reelected to the state supreme court in 2016.

By nominating Judge Larsen, the President would score a political victory no matter what happens during the confirmation process. If the Senate confirms her, Trump can claim victory, charge up his base, and score valuable political points among swing voters in Michigan. If Senate Democrats manage to forestall a vote, Trump can turn that delay into a high-profile campaign issue, deflecting attention from the Biden campaign’s efforts to focus the election on COVID and Trump’s personal behavior.

Judge Larsen is reportedly on the five-person short list under consideration by the President, so her nomination is very possible. And while the qualities of the nominee are secondary to scoring political points — at least to this President — her confirmation would be a positive for the country and the Court. There is little doubt in my mind that she would make an excellent, thoughtful, respected Supreme Court Justice.*

So who will be the Supreme Court nominee? I offer some thoughts in the next post.

* CNN apparently agrees. In a photo caption yesterday, they already referred to Judge Larsen as Justice Larsen.

Does the Roberts Court’s view of executive and legislative power present an alternative case for court reform?

A guest post by Lawrence Friedman

In his recent essay, The cravenness of Democratic “Court reform” proposals, Jordan Singer responds to the left-leaning critics of the Supreme Court term just ended who have lamented the results in cases on choice, immigration and employment discrimination—not because the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, failed to reach the results these critics support, but because it did. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, for example, concludes that Roberts, “by refusing to inflame passions further,” may have stemmed “the tide and accomplish[ed] the coveted goal of his GOP critics—preserving the Court’s current conservative majority.” And law professors Kent Greenfield and Adam Winkler prophecy “the moderation shown by Roberts has all but guaranteed a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.”

As Singer explains, these critiques reveal a Democratic goal since the failed Merrick Garland nomination in 2016: “to punish Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump by radically restructuring the Court itself.” The restructuring plans have taken many forms, from imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices to expanding the number of justices who sit on the high court. These reform efforts turn on the belief that, since McConnell and the Republicans refused even to consider Garland, the Court’s legitimacy has suffered—with decisionmaking in controversial cases compounding the problem. The argument for Court reform falters, however, in the face of outcomes that tend to match the views of a majority of Americans – as they did this term in cases concerning choice, immigration and employment discrimination, in all of which Chief Justice Roberts either wrote or sided with the majority.

Professing concerns about the legitimacy of the Court’s decisonmaking is a broad brush with which to paint, and such concerns tend to be overblown: an institution that has survived decisions in cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, and District of Columbia v. Heller is not likely to be cast aside by the American people any time soon. Still, there is a tendency among the Court’s current membership that should be cause for genuine concern: the near-abandonment in cases involving the structural constitution and the separation of powers of any sense of judicial restraint. Continue reading “Does the Roberts Court’s view of executive and legislative power present an alternative case for court reform?”

McConnell gives “golden gavel” to John Roberts after impeachment trial

After the close of the impeachment trial of President Trump this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell presented Chief Justice John Roberts with a “golden gavel.” The token is ordinarily presented to Senators who have sat in the presiding chair for 100 hours. Roberts certainly filled that minimal qualification during his many hours presiding over the trial.

I recently took Elizabeth Warren to task for her trial question that crassly challenged the legitimacy of Roberts and the Supreme Court. McConnell’s presentation can be seen as only a slightly more subtle effort to politicize the Chief Justice for partisan gain. True, Roberts did yeoman’s work in presiding over the trial, all the while maintaining his busy day job (which only involves hearing oral arguments, writing opinions, navigating the personalities and needs of his fellow Justices, and managing an entire branch of the federal government). And in a different era, the presentation of the golden gavel might be properly viewed as a sincere token of appreciation. In this deeply partisan environment, however, it primarily exploits the Chief Justice’s participation to court favor with Republicans — a misappropriation of judicial goodwill for partisan gain.