Is the Supreme Court confirmation process irreparably broken? Some senators say yes.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

WASHINGTON — By historical standards, the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson should have been a layup: A liberal Supreme Court pick who’s indisputably qualified, recently approved by the Senate to sit on a powerful circuit court and nominated under an all-Democratic government to replace an aging liberal after a long-anticipated retirement.

Yet the process turned ugly. Republicans sought to tarnish her image with graphic innuendo about her sentencing in child pornography cases. They hectored her about political issues like critical race theory. Then they came out against her en masse, even though Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., called her “undoubtedly highly qualified, knowledgeable and experienced.”



-snip-

Democrats say Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell broke the process in 2016 when he eliminated a longstanding presumption that a president’s nominee for a vacancy gets a vote. For 10 months he blocked President Barack Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, saying the presidential election was too close. Then in 2020, he rushed through Justice Amy Coney Barrett the week before the election after the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pulling the court to the right.

“The Merrick Garland debacle was the point of no return. Once McConnell stole that seat from Obama, I didn’t think there was any way to depoliticize this process,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. "Something fundamentally broke in this place when Sen. McConnell chose not to give even a hearing to Merrick Garland."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-court-confirmation-process-irreparably-083013582.html

[Bev54]

1. The senate is broken, period. Get rid of the filibuster all together.

[Picaro]

2. 2000 broke the entire system

In 2000, after the phony Brooks Brother
Riot, the SC decided to award the Presidential election to George W. Bush. The participants in the manufactured riot had every reason to believe that if the recount proceeded, that Al Gore would win Florida and the presidency. So, they threw everything at the wall and hoped something would stick. One of the things they did was appeal to the SC to stop the recount. The legal reasoning in the Bush v Gore decision was absurd on its face. So absurd that the court warned that that decision should not be viewed as setting precedent.

That instantly turned the SC from an implicitly partisan body to an explicitly partisan body.

It also broke our so-called democracy.

The Republicans learned a number of lessons in early 2000. One of them was that they could get away with pretty much anything.

McConnell refusing to even consider Merrick Garland was just a continuation of the ruthless anti-democratic politics that now characterizes the Republican party.

Is the SC selection process irretrievably broken? Of course it is. But so is the entire democratic system.