Liberal Hack: Defeating Lugar Might Provoke A "Constitutional Crisis"

Jonathan Chait....idiot.

The most important and alarming facet of Lugar’s defeat, and a factor whose importance is being overlooked at the moment, is one of the things Mourdock cited against him: Lugar voted to confirm two of Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. Obviously, Lugar would not have chosen to nominate an Elena Kagan or a Sonia Sotomayor. But he was following a longstanding practice of extending presidents wide ideological latitude on their Supreme Court picks. In the absence of corruption, lack of qualifications, or unusual ideological extremism, Democratic presidents have always been allowed to pick liberal justices, and Republican presidents conservative ones. That’s not a law. It’s just a social norm.

...

The social norm against blocking qualified, mainstream Supreme Court nominees is one of the few remaining weapons the Republican Party has left lying on the ground. But if Republican senators attribute Lugar’s defeat even in part to those votes for Kagan and Sotomayor, which seems to be the case, what incentive do they have to vote for another Obama nominee? And then what will happen if he gets another vacancy to fill – will Republican senators allow him to seat any recognizably Democratic jurist? Especially as the Supreme Court interjects itself more forcefully into partisan disputes like health care, will it become commonplace for the Court to have several vacancies owing to gridlock, for the whole legitimacy of the institution to collapse?

It's funny but I seem to recall the Republic surviving the defeat of Robert Bork. Of course Chait would argue that Bork wasn't in the "mainstream". Well, let's then consider the vote of one Senator, a chap named Barack Obama. He and many Democrats voted against the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In fact, Obama supported the highly controversial effort to filibuster Bush's Supreme Court nominations.

Liberals like Chait want to live in a world where if liberals can't get their way all the time, they at least get to make the rules up. Liberals must curse Al Gore for inventing the internet because it's one of the great tools conservatives have to push back on the liberals near monopoly on the traditional media.

Story via Philip Klein.

(I corrected the first link. Naturally there has to be a dumb mistake when yo call someone an idiot. It's just science.)

posted by DrewM. at 12:00 PM

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