Michael MacFarlane
Unwitting troll accomplice
Posts: 8,272
Good lord, what a mess.
The "no u" gambit is not going to succeed here. First because, again, I know more about this than you do, and second because what I'm saying is true.
I don't know if you believe that Roger Taney was a qualified candidate, but I will say that if you do, that would be perfectly on-brand for a Republican in 2018.
Snark aside (and I wouldn't have snarked at all here if it weren't the clearest illustration of my point), you're making an unjustified leap here from "confirmation fights occurred" to "confirmation fights that were not about the nominees' qualifications occurred." Now, the process of judging a nominee's qualifications is unavoidably subjective and usually political, and sometimes the Senate gets it wrong. Douglas Ginsburg was deemed unqualified because he once smoked weed with his students, and that was wrong. Robert Bork was deemed unqualified because he thought Bolling v. Sharpe was wrongly decided, and that was right. But Supreme Court fights have historically been, at least nominally, about the nominee's qualifications. If you can pick out a clear example from one of these fights that was explicitly not about whether the nominee was qualified, I'm interested to hear it, because that's the standard you have to meet even start justifying McConnell's rejection of Garland by historical precedent.
(I'm happy to remind you, in case you've forgotten, that McConnell was refusing to hold hearings on any Obama nominee, however qualified, as early as one month after Scalia's death--God rest his soul in heaven; his and Vince Foster's and Seth Rich's vengeance on their Clinton-hired murderers will be swift, I'm sure--and maybe earlier! I haven't done an exhaustive look back yet. But no one in the Senate GOP caucus ever seriously questioned Garland's qualifications; no one ever even waited to see whose qualifications they'd be judging.)
Later? The few people who heard the speech live were well aware that there was no pending nominee, and the "during the 'election campaign'" part is in the speech; did you bother reading the whole thing, or did you have The Federalist read the fun parts to you?
Look, there's no denying the Biden speech is politically self-serving. There's no doubt that he'd have preferred George W. Bush never nominate another Supreme Court justice, and in retrospect it's hard to blame him, because from the moment Samuel Alito got onto that stage he's publicly and repeatedly proven himself to be one of the absolute dimmest human beings ever to serve in the federal appellate courts. But you don't create precedent with dicta. Biden or Schumer or whoever can say what they want. Their public politicking, premised on hypothetical nominations that never came to pass, did not and could not have created the rule that McConnell pretends existed.
See above.
Well, hey, that sounds like a perfectly logical extension of the principle McConnell invented to deny Garland a hearing. They're coequal branches of government, after all.
Heh. John Cornyn tried floating this conspiracy theory during the hearing and got nowhere. The original reporter has confirmed it's not true. If anyone's still wondering whether you're offering genuine arguments or just parroting your preferred conservative-friendly current events website, I hope they feel they've got their answer now.
If you think the waiters are rude, you should see the manager.