Younger readers might not have seen the ad, but in 1987, much of the country saw an anti-drug abuse commercial featuring an angry father confronting his teenaged son. The dad demands to know where the teenager learned to do drugs.
“From you, all right?” the son replies. “I learned it by watching you!”
The ad came to mind watching the latest developments on Capitol Hill. Newsweek reported:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was called out by his Democratic colleague after the Kentucky senator complained about playing ‘political games’ with judicial nominations. McConnell made the remark during a Senate floor session on Monday and said he was concerned that two U.S. circuit court judges who had plans to retire may not follow through with them in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. election.
“This sort of partisan behavior undermines the integrity of the judiciary,” McConnell said. “Never, never before has a circuit judge un-retired after a presidential election. It’s literally unprecedented.”
Of course, those interested in playing “political games” with judicial nominations could very easily turn to the Kentucky Republican by saying, “From you, all right? We learned it by watching you!”
If, for example, McConnell seriously wants to have a conversation about what’s “literally unprecedented” when it comes to the politicization of the federal judiciary, the Senate GOP leader should be interested in his own record.
It was in February 2016, for example, when then-Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. Then-President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a center-left, compromise jurist — who’d received praise from Senate Republicans — to fill the vacancy, which in turn opened the door to a historic opportunity to stop the high court’s drift to the right.
McConnell instead decided to impose an unprecedented high court blockade for nearly a year, hoping that Americans might elect a Republican president and Republican Congress despite the GOP’s abusive tactics.
It worked: McConnell effectively stole a Supreme Court seat from one administration and handed it to another. He’s repeatedly boasted about the pride he takes in having executed the transgressive scheme.
Nearly four years later, as Election Day 2020 approached, McConnell and his GOP brethren scrambled to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — abandoning the principles Republicans pretended to care about four years earlier — even as millions of Americans were taking advantage of early voting.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but McConnell has done more than anyone alive to politicize the judiciary. To the extent that anyone is playing “political games” with judicial nominations, they are merely following the playbook the Kentucky Republican authored years ago.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
