War-Gaming the Supreme Court Nomination Fight
Here's the nice thing about having a Senate majority leader who was reelected in 2014 with 56 percent of the vote: If Mitch McConnell decides there will be no Senate vote for any Obama nominee, no one can overrule him, and he cannot be punished at the ballot box -- presuming Kentuckians disagreed with his stance -- until 2020. As Sean Davis lays out, Democrats can do a lot to slow down the operating process in the Senate, attempting to pressure Republicans to (1) hold hearings, (2) hold a committee vote, (3) hold a vote, (4) accept Obama's nomination. Democrats can file a "motion to discharge" the nomination, but they would need 60 votes -- meaning the 44 Democrats and two Democrat-aligned independents would need to win over 14 Republicans to their side on the motion. So the White House strategy will be to "shame" Senate Republicans . . . Party officials are turning to a shaming campaign, seeking to badger Senate Republicans and label them obstructionists, in hopes that a few of them -- presumably those with uphill re-election battles -- will stop echoing the party line. Obama, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, made the argument that refusing to consider a nominee would show clear disregard for constitutional norms. Wait, the president who filibustered Samuel Alito is arguing that the Republicans are being obstructionist? Yeah, try again, champ. How many Senate Republicans might waver? Let's assume that none of the Senate Republicans want to replace Scalia with a Sotomayor clone. The question is which Republicans represent usually Democratic blue or purple states, where support for the president's nominee is likely to be higher than average. Four immediately come to mind: Mark Kirk from Illinois, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and maybe Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. All four could take a position that all nominees deserve fair consideration on their merits, that it's a shame the partisan divisions have gotten so harsh, that we could all take a lesson from the warm friendship between Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg . . . they can be soft, cuddly Care Bears on this . . . and lament that despite all their best efforts for cooperation and comity, that darn McConnell just won't budge. Even then, all four could vote with the Democrats and still not give them enough votes for a motion to discharge. They could even say they would support Obama's nominee if given the chance to vote. (They really shouldn't, of course. It's not like voting for the next Obama nominee will make their Democratic rivals take it easy on them in the 2016 Senate races.) At some point in the coming weeks, Obama will nominate a Supreme Court justice -- and then the debate shifts from being about whether the Republicans are unreasonable to consider any potential justice to what everyone thinks of this potential justice. Ironically for Republicans, when it comes to Obama nominees, the worse, the better -- in other words, the more ideologically extreme the nominee is, the easier it is to justify their "no" vote or refusing to vote at all. It sounds like Joe Biden wants to see a moderate: "This is a potentially gigantic game-changer," Biden told a POLITICO reporter and a Washington Post reporter during a sitdown on Air Force Two. "My advice is the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what was done in the past." Biden mentioned two examples of Republican nominees who were confirmed in times of flux because they weren't overtly ideological conservatives -- current swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, "who wasn't a conservative's conservative," and former Justice David Souter, who often ended up voting with the Court's liberal wing. He said Obama also intends to nominate "someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesn't have a specific agenda," even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he shouldn't bother nominating anyone in his last year. Biden said he hasn't met with Obama to discuss the nomination yet, and he refused to discuss specific candidates like U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2013. But he said there are plenty of available candidates without reputations as liberal advocates. Who Is Sri Srinivasan? Back on Valentine's Day, Robert Reich wrote on Facebook: "My mole in the White House tells me Obama will nominate 46-year-old Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American jurist who Obama nominated in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- and the Senate confirmed unanimously." The emerging conventional wisdom on Srinivasan is that he's a Souter at worst and an Anthony Kennedy or Sandra Day O'Connor at best. He was a clerk for O'Connor and worked in the Solicitor General's office during the George W. Bush administration, from 2002 to 2007. He returned to private practice, lectured at Harvard Law School, and then Obama brought him back to that office in 2011. If he is the nominee, expect a lot of questions about what he did as a member of Al Gore's legal team during the 2000 recount in Florida. Liberals are looking at him a little warily; in 2013, the White House made this case: The White House can also point anxious liberals to Srinivasan's work in Obama's solicitor general's office, and to pro bono briefs he filed opposing Indiana's restrictive voter ID law and supporting affirmative action. Srinivasan successfully prevented a legal immigrant from being deported over a minor gun offense and represented a Spanish-speaking child in Arizona in a case alleging the state had failed to provide enough English-instruction to students learning English as a second language. Srinivasan also successfully represented a criminal defendant before the Supreme Court who had been charged with a felony because he purchased cocaine on his cellphone, when he would have been charged with a misdemeanor otherwise. Srinivasan wrote a brief siding against the government and with the target of unconstitutional surveillance in a brief filed in the important US v. Jones case. Conservative legal eagles like him and respect him, but they don't necessarily think everybody they like and respect should get to replace Scalia on the court. Introducing the GOP's New Spring Fashion Line South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, at the end of a rally for Marco Rubio in Greenville: "Take a picture of this, because this new group of conservatives taking over America looks like a Benetton commercial!"
ADDENDA: My perspective on Trump gets its origin story told: Back in the early 1980s, when Donald J. Trump was building Trump Tower at 57th and Fifth, the future presidential candidate made quite the impression on Richard Geraghty. During construction, Trump occupied a third-floor office in a nearby building. Geraghty, now of Bluffton and vice-chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Club, worked as a CPA in a building across the street. From his fifth-floor office, he could see into the young real estate mogul's office window. And Trump could see into Geraghty's. This made it a whole lot easier for the two men to shake their fists and point their fingers at each other when they argued on the phone over leasing terms. "They were garbage leases," Geraghty said. "Garbage." Geraghty was among a group of Beaufort County Republican self-described "nerds" who I had lunch with recently. Yes, since about age six or seven, I had been hearing over the family dinner table about how duplicitous, erratic, arrogant, dismissive, and obstinate this guy named Donald Trump is, how he'll agree to something Monday and insist he never agreed to it Tuesday, how he'll dismiss your concerns, hand-wave away details, forget promises, bellow, sneer, bluster . . . . . . and now, he's the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Yay! On this week's pop-culture podcast, Mickey and I note that the country got its first good look at the Broadway smash hit "Hamilton" during this year's Grammy Awards broadcast . . . did they see the same thing that the ecstatic live audiences and gushing critics did? I saw Deadpool and fear what it could mean for the comic-book genre of movies. We ask what the point of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is, and gasp at the news that Whole Foods is contemplating adding tattoo parlors.  | 
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