Vigil for late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at U.S. Supreme Court
With the death of U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week, attention is rightfully being paid to what happens next on the Court. It appears that Donald Trump, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and just about all Republican Senators are ready to jam another justice onto the Court this year, even though doing so just weeks before the 2020 elections is antithetical to their 2016 blocking of President Barack Obama‘s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, the Democrats may be the ones capitalizing on the Republicans’ Supreme Court plans. First, the Democrats are racking up crazy donations since Ginsburg’s death. Second, the latest polls continue to have plenty of good news for Joe Biden and bad news for Trump. Indeed, in a new poll asking whether Justice Ginsburg should be replaced before the presidential election on November 3, 62 percent of respondents said that the winner of the election (meaning quite possibly Biden) should make that nomination afterward, versus only 23 percent who think Trump should get the choice now.
Nevertheless, one possible scenario of the upcoming elections is that we end up in a bizarro land, where Democrats win back the White House and the Senate (in addition to keeping their majority in the House of Representatives), they pass great new laws, yet the new Supreme Court, tilted 6-3 instead of 5-4 Republican due to Trump and the Senate GOP replacing Ginsburg this year, goes on to strike down whatever the Democrats implement. The Court can also take away other Democratic laws, or overturn Supreme court decisions, from the past. For example, there is a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that is currently sitting with the Supreme Court for consideration. This lawsuit was brought by a number of Republican state Attorneys General. A new 6-3 Republican Supreme Court is more likely to have the votes to strike down the ACA. Moreover, many such Republican officials will still be around to bring other federal lawsuits against other Democratic federal laws in the future, and they’re likely to have a more Republican SCOTUS to accept such cases, regardless of the 2020 election outcome. The legal right to abortion, granted in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, is feared by many to be on the chopping block for a 6-3 Republican majority Supreme Court.
All of this leads to two conclusions: first, even if Democrats get the best possible outcome in the upcoming elections, they will need to temper their celebration with the sobering reality that a likely 6-3 Republican Supreme Court can hinder a Democratic agenda for many years. Second, this bizarro result reinforces the need for Democrats to do an even better job of getting out the vote in future elections, especially midterm elections where approximately one-third of Senate seats are up for grabs each time. In the past three midterm elections (2010, 2014 and 2018), Democrats lost a total of 17 U.S. Senate seats, including losing the Senate majority in 2014. For Democratic presidents and Congresses to achieve anything meaningful, that simply cannot happen again.
Photo by yashmori, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/EWV9fM
