No.
On CNN, Sen. Richard Blumenthal says Democrats should “do the right thing” and confirm Gorsuch. #SCOTUS
— Tom McKay (@thetomzone) February 1, 2017
Really? Still? We’re still doing this? It’s 2017. We’re fully more than a decade past the time when Democrats, eager to take the high road and do the right thing and be patriotic and put country before party, sucked George W. Bush’s strap-on and were rewarded for their decency by having the war hero they nominated for president derided as a commie faggot peace-freak appeaser. We jus spent eight years in which a Democratic president gave weekly speeches about nonexistent well-meaning Republicans who just disagreed on policy while they howled outside his windows burning him in effigy. And we’re still gonna do the right thing?
WHY?
I mean it, God, why? So rich fucks like Richard Blumenthal can look at themselves in the mirror and talk to their reflections about how they tried, or something? So they can feel good about themselves? So they can say they did the “right thing” as defined by some centrist think tank as its members hump the status quo like their lives depend on it? So they don’t ruffle any feathers on the half-plucked chicken we’ve placed in the executive branch? So that maybe next time they’ll get a freebie? How stupid are these people?
Let me explain this for everybody, the fucking club of the most of them, that just got here on the last bus out of Idiotville. Let me tell you what will happen if Democrats hold hearings and confirm this guy. Let’s imagine they do that, and somehow we all survive the next four years and come out alive, and it’s a Democratic president in that chair the next time. And maybe Ruth Bader Ginsberg or one of the other 400-year-old people decides to pack it in. Let me lay out for you what happens next.
In payment for Democrats being so nice and good, and voting to confirm this suit filled with cockroaches to the highest court in the land, Republicans will make the next Democratic nominee into the biggest screaming pinko terrorist butt-buddy to ever walk the earth. They will portray that person, most likely a semi-conservative career prosecutor or the like, as a grave threat to the Republic and come up with endless rationales for delaying and finally denying his or her confirmation, and after they do that they’ll take victory laps at CPAC so the frog-fuckers who vote for them can shower them with praise for saving the land.
That will be your reward, Democrats, for “doing the right thing” by Republicans. Would that any of you were half as interested in doing the right thing by your constituents, or by America. Would that you felt as strongly about doing the right thing for us. Would that that kept you up at night.
Schmucks.
A.
Have I told you lately I love you?
Damn. dmark beat me to it.
Early-mid W’s first term, these righteous and impassioned rants captured my heart on first reading, and I’ve been in love with Athenae ever since, via the magic of electrons.
“The were never our leaders”
Interesting times then
Interesting times now
Indeed.
as if we get rewarded. FUCK the GOP.
Put me in the “Fuck NO!” column!
Coincidentally Carl Hulse had a piece on Gorsuch making the congressional rounds this very day and described that Gorsuch has a very broad view of what might come before the court as far as declining to answer any questions on how he would rule on something. But he was happy to talk about what he had done on past cases. Collins was effusive about talking with him about the meaning of precedent for an hour.
Although no one has really answered all of the questions for decades, Schumer seems to think that this is a line of attack. This line of attack becomes fair when the nominee won’t talk about judicial philosophy at all, not even as anodyne a line as “stick to the law and the facts” that Sotomayor used. I think I am trying to say that you can be fair, and give him his hearing, and if he does worse than Kagan as far as general intelligence and appearing judicial and having a justifiable point of view you have something to take to the American people. “Trump picked him” is a completely partisan argument especially since the list of potential nominees was presented to Trump by others. But this is all I have heard online. “He had to be approved by Bannon” is slightly better. “Do you believe for 5 minutes that Trump cares about the integrity of the 3rd branch” is much better. But he might still have picked someone decent by accident.
IRL, in extremely vague circumstances because I was one of about 4 people privy to the conversation, I heard that both Gorsuch and Garland were honorable lawyers/judges caught in a bad system. I think that’s about right. A SCOTUS nominee is different from a cabinet nominee in that you want that position to be aspired to by everyone in the legal profession who is honorable. If someone once decides that the process is not fair and they won’t put their name in you degraded the Court forever.
All that said, it’s really important to put Trump on notice that you will be watching carefully and smartly for what will make a second pick unacceptable and how to stop the pick, even if you may not have the filibuster for that person.
(I.e. McConnell has taken it away, not that the nominee has 60 votes anyhow.)