That’s a question I asked from the beginning. Joe Biden made his promise to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court during the presidential campaign. Given the ages of at least a couple of the justices, the opportunity to nominate a replacement was all but guaranteed in a first term. Why didn’t Biden have this choice made already?
Some Senate Democrats are chafing at the delay already, two weeks before Biden’s deadline:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who met with Biden at the White House Thursday, says he wants to get started on the confirmation process as soon as possible.
Durbin said he wants Biden to “do it soon.”
“I think we understand the importance of the responsibility we have and we’re anxious to get this Senate moving forward. We started to pick up speed recently and we want to continue that,” he said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another member of the Judiciary Committee, said he wants Biden to “move as promptly as possible.” … “I think time is really urgent,” Blumenthal added. “We need to move forward quickly but fairly.”
Now that Senator Ben Ray Luján is clearly on the road to recovery and return to the Senate in a few weeks, there’s no more benefit to delay for Senate Democrats. As I wrote nearly three weeks ago, this gets more politically fraught the longer it goes on. Democrats and advocates are lining up behind their preferred candidates, and they’re doing the kind of oppo research that Senate Dems expect from Republicans. In the process, they’re damaging candidates like Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Childs, and Leondra Kruger even before the real partisan games begin. That will take some of the luster off of the eventual nominee even prior to what will likely be a highly contentious Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation.
Speaking of which, Politico reports that everyone’s playing nice on the Senate Judiciary Committee … for now. No one’s forgotten about the Democrats’ character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh, but for the moment everyone says all is forgiven. Well, almost everyone:
Sheldon Whitehouse and Ben Sasse agree they traded harsh words during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. They just don’t agree on how the spat ended.
“At one point, Ben Sasse said that he was so mad at me he wanted to hit me,” Whitehouse recalled in an interview. “We went and we sat, actually, in the committee room where people could see us while we were in one of those discussions. And I explained to him the facts … he said, ‘Well, if that’s what happened, then you’re right. I have no reason to be mad.’”
Whitehouse said he and the Nebraska Republican are now fine. But Sasse spokesperson James Wegmann accused the Rhode Island Democrat of “peddling bullshit conspiracy theories” during the Kavanaugh confirmation, adding that “there was no agreement, and to this day I’m sure he thinks Whitehouse’s behavior was despicable.”
It’s hard to overstate how personal the animosity on the Senate Judiciary Committee became during the Kavanaugh fight, as late-breaking accusations of sexual assault against the judge pitted furious Democrat against seething Republican. Those tensions still ripple through the panel as it prepares to consider the nation’s first Black woman Supreme Court nominee this year.
Boof Truther Whitehouse, you mean? His behavior was despicable, as was his grasp of 1970s/1980s teen slang. Whitehouse mistook boof for boff and crafted an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory complete with nonsense calendars and charts. His five-minute questioning of Kavanaugh was among the most embarrassing and insipid moments in the chamber’s history, and to this day no one can still explain why the US Senate had to endure a lengthy colloquy on farting.
Senate Republicans may not be teeing up a similar personal-destruction strategy for Biden’s nominee, but they’re clearly not going to give her a tongue bath either. Ted Cruz declared that “we’re not going to go into the gutter” on “personal slurs and scandal,” but Senate Democrats can certainly expect a highly detailed and hostile cross-examination on professional histories and written opinions from the other side of the aisle. The longer that Biden waits to make his pick, the more material Democrats’ own allies will provide them for those attacks, plus the more divided and dispirited their base will be when their favored candidates don’t get the nod.
Had Biden prepared for this moment with a swift nomination, much of that could have been avoided — especially the internecine fight on the Left. Once again, though, Biden has proven himself to be unprepared and reactive, even when an opportunity was as predictable as this Supreme Court opening. Biden made his promise on the campaign trail well over a year ago; did he do nothing to prepare in between on one of the most important decisions in modern presidencies? If Biden had his nomination ready when Breyer retired, an announcement of the nomination the next day would have (a) eliminated the petty squabbling and lobbying between Democratic factions, and (b) make it look like Biden had his nominee in mind from the moment he made that promise. It would have made Biden look competent, at least.
Instead, Biden’s dithering, and that dithering will erode some of the political benefit that Biden could have drawn from this opening. Senate Democrats understand that and want Biden to get his act together. Perhaps they should have thought of that before foisting a pompous, incompetent fool on the nation in the first place, eh?
