Republicans Are Jizzing Their Pants Over Fresh Opportunity For Outrageous Flip Flopping
They’re all so eager to go back on their word. Aaron Blake, reporting for The Washington Post:
Now that three key GOP senators — Mitt Romney (Utah), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Cory Gardner (Colo.) — have said they will not object to their leaders pressing forward with a Supreme Court nominee, despite their party’s 2016 stance against doing so in a presidential election year, the direction this fight is headed seems pretty clear.
Everyone knows Cory Gardner is a pussy, but Mitt Romney is a little more interesting. He’s been trying to act like he’s not a rank and file Republican, and he can get away with distancing himself from Trump and the rest of the republicans because he’s largely insulated from the voters by their short memories and the fact that his next election isn’t until 2024, but now we see where his priorities lie. Sure, he voted to remove Trump from office during the impeachment debacle, but he did so knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. Here, his vote could have a real impact, and his decision not to stand up for what’s right (as well as the precedent set by his own party four years ago) is unforgivable.
But some Republicans are going quite a bit further than that. They’re effectively signing off on whomever the nominee is, despite there not actually being a nominee yet. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said as much this weekend in announcing his support.
“There is a clear choice on the future of the Supreme Court between the well-qualified and conservative jurist President Trump will nominate and I will support, and the liberal activist Joe Biden will nominate and Cal Cunningham will support, who will legislate radical, left-wing policies from the bench,” Tillis said.
Thom Tillis is a spineless, bootlicking cunt. In his recent, televised debate with Cal Cunningham, he spent the entire hour misconstruing Cal’s responses and setting up straw man arguments because he knows he can’t defend the positions he’s taken on their own merit.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), meanwhile, declared Monday night that his committee would sign off on the as yet unnominated nominee.
“The nominee’s going to be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee,” Graham said on Fox News.
I bet Lindsey Graham doesn’t want his words to be used against him now. The flip flopping is out of control. In 2016, he said the following:
"If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination," Graham said March 10, 2016. "And you could use my words against me, and you'd be absolutely right.”
Chris Cillizza, writing about Graham for CNN:
No one who has followed politics for the last five-ish years -- basically since the rise of Trump -- should be surprised AT ALL that Graham is the Republican senator with the most outrageous flip-flop on, ahem, principle.
You'll remember that when Graham was running against Trump for president in 2016, he described the billionaire businessman as a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." And said this: "You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell."
Fast forward a few years -- and suddenly Graham is one of Trump's biggest defenders (and regular golf buddies.)
What happened? Well, The New York Times' Mark Leibovich put that question directly to Graham back in 2019. And here's how Graham answered: "Well, OK, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it'd be odd not to do this." Pressed by Leibovich on what "this" was, Graham said: "'This' is to try to be relevant."
And, scene.
Americans who are paying attention realize that even if Joe Biden wins the election, it won’t be good enough unless Mitch McConnell gets booted from his current role as Senate Majority Leader, and enough of these morally bankrupt (but certainly not financially bankrupt) Republican senators get voted out.
The right’s obsession with Supreme Court seats ultimately boils down to a deep-seated hope to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, but they’ve proposed no alternative to how abortion should be handled under the law. Would they prefer to ram a SCOTUS nominee through amidst the election, possibly exciting conservatives (exciting or placating? Hmmm.), but certainly enraging liberals? That seems like a surefire way to lose their majority in the senate, at which point, the Democrats would have all the power to legislate new (possibly even more liberal) laws governing abortion. Is that what they want? Republicans are only focusing on the short game, here.
Well calculated or not, this is perhaps the most brazen display of their partisanship and hypocrisy. As Majority Leader, McConnell led the Republican effort to stall on President Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016. Their reasoning was that because 2016 was an election year, the Senate shouldn’t confirm a nominee from a president in the final year of his term, and should instead wait until after the inauguration to let the newly elected president nominate the next justice. Of course, that meant that the court would have a vacancy for nearly 11 months at the least. Now, when the same thing has happened in the last year of Trump’s term, yet they now claim to believe that time is of the essence and that it would be irresponsible to wait just four months to allow the newly elected president to make the nomination. It’s shameless partisanship that has real consequences.
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