It is an open secret that Dianne Feinstein is even more mentally incapacitated than Joe Biden. But she hails from a one-party state, and that party has been covering up her dementia for a decade.

She's 89. Just a few years older than Biden.

She's now been out of the Senate for six weeks due to shingles, and Democrats are calling for her resignation, as, without her vote on the Judiciary Committee, they can't pass through all of Biden's unqualified leftwing diversity checklist picks.

She refused to resign -- or her handlers refused on her behalf, wanting to keep their jobs -- but allowed that she would deign to someone replacing her on the Committee on a temporary basis.

But, Christopher Bedford points out, that scheme requires Republicans to cooperate.

And they should refuse that cooperation.

Republicans have the power, too: Committee assignments are decided at the beginning of the session, either by unanimous consent or, if contested, by the vote of at least 60 senators. Democrats certainly hope they can just brush this through under the former, but what reason does Sen. Josh Hawley, or maybe Sen. Mike Lee, or Sen. J.D. Vance have to let that one pass them by?

Then if one senator says no, the whole thing's got to come to a vote, and while people like Sen. Mitt Romney might be happy to fill benches with left-wing judges in the name of "decency" or some other principle long ago extinguished by left-wing activists, getting nine other Republicans to join him might prove more difficult.

I'm less and less interested in what the indecent Pierre Delicto thinks constitutes "decency."

The task of persuading 10 Republicans to cooperate with the president's judicial agenda will prove even more difficult if Sen. Mitch McConnell -- himself just out of the hospital (and seven years older than Josef Stalin was when he died) -- holds the line. While populist conservatives may have little love for the minority leader, they must give him credit for hard-nosed judiciary tactics.

No one's talking about government funding here, or defense, or some other thing sacred to the old guard of the GOP. At issue is an essentially lawless administration seeding the court with the types of judges who will uphold their lawlessness. Why cooperate in that?

Weak-kneed Republicans might suggest not cooperating with the Democrats on this issue would be poor form or set a bad precedent. Those Republicans might need reminding that mild-mannered Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused of being a serial rapist in front of the entire country. Poor form? Bad precedents? In the context of today's political battles, those ideas hold little sway.

And let no man mention "normalcy."

posted by Ace at 02:39 PM

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