“Republicans Are Breaking The Senate”: Imposing A Blockade On The Constitutional Process Itself
As I was making the news rounds this morning, I noticed a tweet from Vox’s Ezra Klein that said, simply, “The Republican Party is broken.” The five-word headline gave me pause – not because it was wrong, but because it occurred to me Ezra could have been referring to a variety of concurrent problems.
As it turns out, Ezra’s piece was about Donald Trump’s relative dominance thus far in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but I’ll confess that when I first saw “The Republican Party is broken,” one of my first thoughts went to developments in the GOP-led Senate.
Consider this Des Moines Register report published overnight.
A White House invitation for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley to discuss the current U.S. Supreme Current vacancy with President Barack Obama has so far gone unanswered.
Turning down the meeting would represent a break in protocol from two previous high court vacancies during Obama’s presidency, when the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the Senate majority and minority leaders attended Oval Office meetings.
Remember, it was just last week when Rachel sat down with Vice President Biden, and they talked about the process of confirming Supreme Court justices. He reflected on an anecdote from 1987 in which President Ronald Reagan, following the failure of two Supreme Court nominees, met with then-Sen. Biden in the Oval Office, asking, “OK, Joe, who do you want?” The Republican president pulled out a list of potential names and they had a conversation about the prospective justices.
When Rachel asked if we should expect something similar now, the vice president quickly responded that President Obama would absolutely “reach out” to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), among others, as part of a traditional advise-and-consent process.
But that only works if senators are willing to have a conversation.
“Early this week, we extended an invitation to Chairman Grassley and Ranking Member Leahy to join President Obama in the Oval Office for a consultative meeting of filling the Supreme Court vacancy,” a senior White House official told the Des Moines Register. “We have not heard back from Chairman Grassley.”
I suspect for the Iowa Republican, the calculus is pretty straightforward: Grassley has no intention of ever doing his duty, so there’s no real point in going to the Oval Office to discuss whether or not Grassley is going to take his responsibilities seriously. He’s already decided not to.
But let’s recognize this for what it is: a scandal. For the first time in American history, a Senate majority party not only intends to leave a Supreme Court vacancy in place for a year, Republicans are also imposing a blockade on the constitutional process itself. As of yesterday, Grassley won’t talk to the president about potential justices, and at least five GOP senators – including the Senate Republican leadership – said they won’t even talk to the president’s nominee if he or she showed up at their offices for a visit.
Nothing like this has ever happened in the American experience. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a demonstrable fact. As Republican politics reach new levels of radicalization, the intensity of their maximalist tactics has arrived at an unprecedented and scary point.
The Republican Party may very well be broken, but just as alarming is the fact that the GOP is tearing the Senate down with it.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 25, 2016
“History Isn’t On Their Side – And Neither Is The Calendar”: Justice Kennedy’s Confirmation Debunks Key GOP Talking Point
Soon after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death was announced, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement, “The fact of the matter is that it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year.”
The fact of the matter is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee should have done his homework before getting this wrong.
The “80 years” talking point spread like wildfire in Republican circles – it was repeated by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio during Saturday night’s debate – to the point that the GOP has convinced itself that at no point in the modern era has the Senate confirmed a Supreme Court justice in an election year.
About 14 justices were confirmed in election years, and perhaps the most pertinent example is Justice Anthony Kennedy. As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne noted this morning:
A Senate controlled by Democrats confirmed President Reagan’s nomination of Anthony Kennedy on a 97 to 0 vote in February 1988, which happened to be an election year.
Yes, in Reagan’s eighth year, nine months before Election Day 1988, the Democratic-led Senate confirmed Kennedy with ease.
Chuck Grassley, who’d already been in the Senate for seven years at that point, delivered remarks on Feb. 13, 1988 – exactly 28 years to the day before Scalia’s passing – urging the Senate to confirm Kennedy during that election year.
Grassley voted for Kennedy’s nomination on the Senate floor soon after. So too did a young man by the name of Mitch McConnell, a Republican senator from Kentucky in his first term.
At the time, Ronald Reagan, stung by two failed nominees to the high court (Douglas Ginsburg and Robert Bork), said at the time that if Senate Democrats played election-year games by stalling on Kennedy’s nomination in 1988, the “American people will know what’s up.”
And on this, he was correct.
But we know, of course, that Democrats didn’t bother. There was a vacancy on the Supreme Court; the White House nominated a qualified and credible jurist; the Senate considered his qualifications; and he was confirmed in an election year without much of a fuss – even though the Senate was controlled by Democrats and Reagan was a Republican president.
It’s true that Kennedy was first nominated in late 1987, but the point is the right is now arguing that election-year confirmation votes have no modern precedent. Or as Grassley put it, “[I]t’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year.”
The Kennedy example proves otherwise.
If this were December 2016, Senate Republicans would be in a far better position to balk. But it’s mid-February, and the Senate’s to-do list for the next several months is quite thin. History isn’t on their side – and neither is the calendar.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 15, 2016
“Lots Of Minority People Are Already Voting”: Top Senate Republican Rejects Call For Voting-Rights Fix
It was just last month when much of the nation’s attention turned to Selma, Alabama, where Americans saw former President George W. Bush stand and applaud a call for Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act with a bipartisan bill. Many wondered if, maybe sometime soon, Congress’ Republican majority might agree to tackle the issue.
Voting-rights advocates probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Soon after the event honoring those who marched at the Edmund Pettus Bridge a half-century ago, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) dismissed the very idea of working on the issue. “I think Eric Holder and this administration have trumped up and created an issue where there really isn’t one,” the Texas Republican said.
Asked if Congress should repair the Voting Rights Act formula struck down by the Supreme Court, Cornyn replied, simply, “No.”
Yesterday at the National Press Club, another key GOP senator echoed the sentiment.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Monday he doesn’t expect to bring up legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, because lots of minority people are already voting. […]
“It depends on what you want to fix,” he said. “If you want to fix more minorities voting, more minorities are already voting.”
The Iowa Republican said the “original intent” of the Voting Rights Act is no longer applicable because “in the last 50 years, it’s made great progress.”
As a factual matter, it’s true that lots of voters from minority communities vote. It’s also true that the nation has made “great progress” as compared to a half-century ago.
But given every relevant detail, Grassley’s posture is tough to defend.
Between the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act and a coordinated Republican campaign, half the nation’s states “have adopted measures making it harder to vote” since 2011. Ari Berman recently added that from 2011 to 2015, “395 new voting restrictions have been introduced” in 49 states.
To see the Voting Rights Act as some kind of quaint relic, no longer needed or valuable in today’s society, is to deny the basics of recent events. The organized assault on voting rights in recent years is unlike anything Americans have seen since the Jim Crow era, making the Voting Rights Act critically important.
What’s more, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the VRA came with a call from the majority justices for lawmakers to craft a new formula for federal scrutiny. There was, in other words, an expectation that Congress, which reauthorized the VRA repeatedly and easily over the decades, would respond to the court ruling with a revised policy.
And yet, here are leading Senate Republicans effectively responding, two years later, “Nah, let’s not bother to do anything at all.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 28, 2015
“About Those New Lois Lerner Emails…”: As With Previous “Smoking Guns”, The Truth Is Not Nearly So Outrageous
If the Ways and Means investigation into Lois Lerner had really and truly uncovered a “push to audit Senator Chuck Grassley,” then the Republican Party might finally have had the scandal it was so sure it would eventually find.
Yet as with previous smoking guns in the never-ended Internal Revenue Service story, the truth is not nearly so outrageous.
The supposed targeting of Tea Party groups actually involved keyword searches that included liberal groups, as well. And the supposed “push” was actually more of an aborted nudge.
Here’s what happened. Ms. Lerner received an invitation to an event intended for Mr. Grassley. Ms. Lerner sent an email to a colleague, Matthew Giuliano, wondering if the invitation were kosher, and asked if the issue should be referred for examination. The colleague suggested it should not, and Ms. Lerner backed off.
You can read the full e-mail exchange here. Or read an excerpt below:
Lerner: Is this the one where we got the copy to Grassley? Did he get one to me? Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for his wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?
Giuliano: It is, and yes. Your and Grassley’s invitations were placed in each other’s envelopes. Not sure we should send to exam. I think the offer to pay for Grassley’s wife is income to Grassley, and not prohibited on its face … We would need to wait for: (i) Grassley to accept and attend the speaking arrangement; and (ii) then determine whether [blacked out] issues him a 1099. And even without the 1099, it would be Grassley who would need to report the income on his 1040.
Lerner: Thanks — don’t know why I thought it was a [blacked out] — maybe answer would be the same. Don’t think I want to be on stage with Grassley on this issue.
Ms. Lerner was maybe a little too eager to investigate Mr. Grassley, but once her colleague suggested there probably wasn’t any wrongdoing, she didn’t “push” or shove or anything of the sort. If we’re looking for a physical metaphor, what she did was turn around and walk away.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Taking Note, The Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 26, 2014
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