Democrats, Let Trump Fill the Supreme Court Vacancy

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg yesterday couldn’t have come at a worse time. For strategic reasons, it’s unclear how much the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Senate will rush to fill her spot, but you can be sure that President Donald Trump will use this issue to rally support around his reelection bid.

The last thing Democrats should do is try to obstruct the confirmation process. The rules are simple: in the event of a Supreme Court vacancy, the sitting president gets to nominate someone to fill it, regardless of how close to election time it is, no ifs or buts. If the Democrats try to obstruct this candidate’s confirmation, in the hopes that Biden will win in November and nominate someone more liberal, it will be seen as a faithless political ploy – the mirror-image of the one they rightly condemned Senate Republicans for pulling in 2016, when they refused to vote on Merrick Garland’s nomination because they hoped Trump would win the election. Instead, Democrats should let the process go forward, and engage earnestly in it, and by doing so show the Republicans – and the American people – that they are the more principled side, that they are willing to play by the rules and put country over party, even if their opponents are not.

This would not only be the right thing to do, it would also be the smart thing to do. Trump is not a normal Republican president, and these are not normal times. Trump has obstructed investigations into his misconduct, solicited a bribe from a foreign government, fired patriotic dissenters and whistleblowers, kowtowed to dictators, made a mockery of the American values that politicians on both sides have long purported to cherish, alienated America’s allies, disgraced the country internationally, and thoroughly botched its coronavirus response through his incompetence and science-denial. This combination of stupidity and proto-fascism has even made many longstanding Republicans conclude that he is uniquely unfit for the presidency, and to do the previously unthinkable and break from the party to publicly denounce him and back his opponent.

But if Democrats cynically obstruct the Supreme Court confirmation process, they help Trump to portray this election as a normal election: not the battle for America’s soul that it is, in which people should abandon partisanship and vote their conscience, but as politics as usual, in which both sides are just as unscrupulous, and just as fixated on getting their candidate in by whatever means necessary, and in which people should just vote for the devil they know. The more bipartisan Americans feel, the more likely they are to favor Joe Biden as the obviously more decent and more competent candidate. The more partisan Americans feel, though, the more the sense of tribal loyalty takes over, and the more this election just becomes a tossup between two roughly-evenly-matched groups of partisans.