Mitch McConnell of 1970 Contradicts Mitch McConnell of 2016 On SCOTUS Confirmations Last Updated on February 15, 2016296
In a move that rather coldly politicized Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky pointed out within barely an hour that he did not believe that a president in his last year should appoint a Supreme Court judge.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”
Notwithstanding the fact that the American people would have a voice in Obama’s nomination through their right to vote since they voted for Obama and he still has 11 months of the term he was elected for to go, McConnell’s words are proving to be problematic in other ways.
First, it was widely reported shortly after that statement that McConnell confirmed the nomination of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1988, which just happened to be the final year of a president’s term. That president, however, was Ronald Reagan, Republican hero. That one was fairly simple to find, and one wonders whether or not Mitch McConnell has ever heard of Google.
Now, an article published by Kentucky Law Journal has also emerged from their 1970-71 issue, written by a much younger Mitchell A. McConnell.
“What standard then can be drawn for the Senate from the experiences of the past year in advising and consenting to Presidential nominations to the Supreme Court? They have been set out above but should be reiterated in conclusion. At the outset, the Senate should discount the philosophy of the nominee. In our politically centrist society, it is highly unlikely that any Executive would nominate a man of such extreme views of the right of the left as to be disturbing to the Senate…
The President is presumably elected by the people to carry out a program and altering the ideological directions of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a Presidential platform. To that end, the Constitution gives to him the power to nominate. As mentioned earlier, if the power to nominate had been given to the Senate, as was considered during the debates at the Constitutional Convention, then it would be proper for the Senate to consider political philosophy.”
So while 1970s Mitch McConnell found it a “perfectly legitimate part” of a president’s job to steer the Supreme Court in a particular ideological direction until that president was Barack Obama. Suddenly, McConnell’s entire philosophy around the responsibilities of the president have changed. Suddenly, McConnell is concerned for “voters.”
This is unsurprising considering that Mitch McConnell is the same man who said that his first priority was to make a newly-elected President Obama a “one-term president.” The book “The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era,” written by the award-winning author Michael Grunwald, revealed in 2008, McConnell led private meetings with other Republican political leaders and along with Eric Cantor initiated a strategy in which Republicans agreed to simply block everything Obama tried to pass.
“[McConnell and Cantor in 2009] laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. ‘If he was for it,’ former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, ‘we had to be against it.’”
McConnell seems to be absolutely stuck on that strategy, despite the fact that he failed at his mission to keep President Obama from serving a second term. Perhaps now, it’s time for McConnell to accept that voters elected president Obama to do a job, and we meant for him to do that job throughout his entire two terms.