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Mitch McConnell shares GOP's ‘worst nightmare’ scenario of a Harris-Walz White House

114 comments

  • By the way, on packing the Supreme Court ... you may know this already. It's unconstitutional.

    The only things the constitution has to say on the matter of the supreme court are: there has to be one, the supreme court judges should be paid, and the president can appoint supreme court justices with the advice and consent of the senate. It is completely silent on matters of how many supreme court justices there should be, or how long their terms should be.

    For all his many, many faults, Mitch McConnell is not a profoundly stupid man, so I'm sure he knows this. Since he very likely knows this already, he probably has a reason for lying to the public on the matter. If the president does appoint several more justices, it's not like the Republicans can sue: no lower court would take the case, and the supreme court would already be packed with people who will actually be faithful to the constitution. So legal threats are a complete non-starter. That just leaves non-legal threats, which is what I think this is. I think Glitch is previewing the Republican strategy in the case of Harris getting more justices hired, which is they'll stoke up the fear and hatred of their idiotic, mouth breathing supporters. It's a thinly-veiled threat of treason.

  • McConnell called the Walz-Harris ticket “the far left of the Democratic Party.”

    😆😆😆

  • Oh, he's more worried about the nightmare for the GOP. Not for the country. Imagine that - he's more worried about the potential for the power of a political party to be diminished than he is about the end of the country.

  • That Turtle Mitch dares comment on packing the supreme court is just inconceivable

  • Man, that's the worst nightmare scenario? Fucking weaksauce. They'd still be breathing, instead of, y'know, put up against a wall and shot, like SCOTUS has ruled is perfectly legal now. As always, every word out of his mouth is self-serving bullshit.

  • Flatly wrong about packing SCOTUS. It's probably a bad idea--as is ending the filibuster--but it's not unconstitutional.

    As to why it's a bad idea - Republicans haven't increased the size of the court when they've held the legislature and presidency; packing the court would encourage them to do the same the next time they have power--and they will eventually, because that's the way politics have gone in this country--and we'd quickly end up with a court that's even more unwieldy than it is now.

    The same principle applies to ending the filibuster; if it's ended now, then Dems can't use it when they are out of power in the Senate. Because, again, Republicans will win again at some point--possibly even this fall--and giving absolute power to a single party is a bad idea.

    • And that's how we keep scooting to the right.

      People think there's a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn't the case. Look at what happened for appointments to the supreme Court under Obama vs trump as an example. I understand why you might feel this way considering that the nuclear option for ending cloture wasn't used by Republicans until Harry Reid did it, but 20 years later honor and decorum are no longer foundational to government.

      Anymore, I think the best thing to do is use tools available to terrible effect, then with any luck all the "honor system" stuff can be written into law.

      Bring back the talking filibuster, and pack the court to fix it's rules, ethics, and enforcement (the court doesn't even respect stare decisis anymore), add states, expand the cap on the house, blow the electoral college. No more gentlemen's agreements.

      At least that's how I see it.

      • I'm absolutely fine with the talking filibuster; I love it, and think we should do it. Killing it entirely? No.

        Packing the court? Also no. If anything, I think that the size should be reduced. I'd be fine with term limits on judges (say, 16 years), along with a code of ethics and mandatory financial disclosures and recusals for conflicts of interest. But packing the court is not a good idea.

        People think there’s a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn’t the case.

        I think that if we're ever going to get back to a point where we aren't hyperpartisan, we need to operate in good faith, even if the other side isn't. Constantly escalating ends up hurting us in the long run. And, again - as soon as you create the tools to get your way, those tools will be used against you; a hammer doesn't care which ideologue is swinging it.

        expand the cap on the house,

        Bad idea. Getting 400+ people to stop arguing long enough to vote on a thing is already hard enough. You'd just be adding more layers of bullshit.

        add states

        Eh. Last I knew, PR didn't really want to be a state; I recall that under 50% of the island population wanted statehood. D.C. might, but I'm not sure that making a city a whole-ass state--particularly since most of the city is actually in Virginia and Maryland--is a good idea. That would have the effect of ensuring that voters in D.C. would be far more powerful than any other voters, since you would have a fairly small number of voters selecting two senators. (I can't find exact populatino data for D.C. alone; all population figures I can find are for metro D.C., which counts large parts of Virginia and Maryland; those voters already have representatives and senators.)

        blow the electoral college

        I oppose this for the same reason that I oppose getting rid of the Senate and going to a direct democracy; an electoral college balances the interests of the states as a whole against the population, because they're not always the same. An electoral system forces candidates to try and balance a message, rather than focusing solely on the most populous areas. Rather than eliminating the electoral college, I'd rather see some form of ranked-choice voting, which would tend to eliminate candidates that had the most extremely unpopular platforms. (E.g., Trump consistently won about 30% of the votes in the 2015 primaries, but a strong majority of voters would have selected him as their last choice. Some form of ranked choice in the Republican primaries likely would have resulted in a candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio instead of Trump.)

        All of this is a balancing game of competing interests and priorities. Steamrolling people and hammering them isn't going to make anything better. Yes, I hear what you're saying about the Overton window, but frankly, that's a messaging problem that the left has created. If the right is able to move the Overton window, it's because the left is doing a really shitty job at meeting voters where they are, while the right is doing a damn good job at outreach.

114 comments