Let’s start here, shall we?
Steve Schmidt is a former lifelong Republican operative whose main claim to fame was masterminding Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. Come Trump, he finally decided that was a bridge too far, and is the co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which ran never-Trump advertising material during the 2020 elections and has continued to target the seditionists who voted to overturn the results, even AFTER the January 6 attack. I’m not going to say that there is no value at all in these efforts; after all, the vast majority of the Republican party still has their lips surgically attached to Trump’s shriveled orange rectum. It does take courage to go against the crowd and reject your previous opinions, so sure, they can all have some genuine credit for doing this. But this is a galactically, mindbogglingly, unbelievably bad “both sides!!!” take that doesn’t have the defense of being the smallest bit correct, and it’s even more depressing that the majority of the replies to this tweet agree with him.
Children, the story of unabashed right-wing Republican fuckery with the Supreme Court starts all the way back in 2000, with a certain case called Bush v. Gore. The closest presidential election in history did not produce a clear winner thanks to ballot fuckery in Florida (quick, everyone look surprised that it was Florida!) Despite Al Gore winning the nationwide popular vote by a narrow majority, Bush v. Gore ordered a halt to the ongoing Florida recount and decided that George Bush had won the Electoral College, and thus, the presidency. This happened at the instigation of the Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican, even though later analysis found that a full statewide recount would have confirmed Gore won Florida and thus the presidency. As a result, in 2005, President Bush nominated Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Court. (This was after he had originally nominated Harriet Miers, a Texas lawyer with very few qualifications aside from being a good buddy of Bush and viewed as a reliably malleable conservative mouthpiece – in short, the first Amy Coney Barrett). Bush was forced to withdraw Miers’ nomination and replace her with Alito. John Roberts, another Bush nominee, also joined the Court at this time, replacing Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
So first stage here: Bush loses the popular vote AND even the state of Florida, but thanks to Supreme Court intervention and the Electoral College, he becomes president anyway (gee, it’s funny how often the EC, exactly as it was designed to do, benefits conservatives and in the modern era, Republicans). He nominates Alito and Roberts.
In 2008, Obama became president, winning – for a change – both the popular vote AND the Electoral College in a landslide. He nominated two justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two well-qualified women who currently make up two of the three liberal justices on the court. At the time, they joined Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Reagan appointees Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, Bush 1 appointee Clarence Thomas, and Bush 2 appointees Alito and Roberts. However, my friends, this is where the Story of Republican SCOTUS Fuckery REALLY kicks into overdrive. Hang on.
In 2010, the Democrats lost the House in the midterms, and in 2014, they lost the Senate, thus beginning Mitch McConnell’s rule of terror as Senate Majority Leader. Aside from blocking every single Obama initiative and doing his best to ensure that any and all legislation that might actually benefit the American people went to die a slow death, McConnell had his eyes on the prize: seizing the Supreme Court for a generation, thanks to the Republicans’ accelerated strategy of packing all levels of the bench with hard-right Federalist Society and John Birch Society activist wingnuts who were determined to remake American jurisprudence in their own horrifying originalist image. Since at this time, the issue of the judiciary was largely a non-starter for Democratic voters, this evil plan did not encounter much resistance.
Anyway, in February 2016, Scalia finally died. The presidential election was a full nine months away, in November, but McConnell refused to even hold hearings for Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland. He just wouldn’t fill the seat, arguing that it was an “election year” (please remember this argument later) and it wasn’t valid for a president to have a pick before then. Of course, McConnell’s gamble paid off when Donald Trump, despite losing the popular vote by over THREE MILLION VOTES, won the Electoral College and became president. He immediately appointed Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s seat. Gorsuch was a wingnut, but he was at least superficially qualified and had an actual legal philosophy. Like all of Trump’s SC picks, he lied to the Judiciary Committee about whether he considered Roe to be settled law, but at least he was a real judge.
The veneer of remotely sane choices was, however, not to last. While McConnell jammed through unqualified right-wing nuts to lifetime appointments at all levels of the judiciary as fast as Trump could pick them, in 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his abrupt retirement under mysterious circumstances. His son had some still-unexplained connection to money launderers extraordinaire and top Trump financer Deutsche Bank, he stepped down, and now the gloves were off. Despite being a Reagan appointee, Kennedy was generally regarded as a moderate swing vote, and wasn’t a hard-right neocon. Trump and Company fixed that quickly by nominating Judge Beer Can Rapist… sorry… Brett Kavanaugh, who was the wingnut they were dreaming of. Despite making a spectacle of himself in his confirmation hearings, sniveling and crying and claiming he just couldn’t remember what happened in college, and being credibly accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford, the Republicans didn’t care. Nah. After Kavanaugh promised Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine who was doing her usual thing of being Concerned, that Roe was settled law, she voted to confirm him. Oops.
So then, in Septembr 2020, RBG finally died at the age of 87. The right wing almost wet themselves with glee, while the dirtbag left – who tends to treat any and all Democratic women as if they personally murdered Bernie Sanders in a woodchipper – instantly blamed her for not retiring earlier. Because you know, a feminist icon who argued (and won) some of the most landmark cases in women’s and gender rights, and one of the most brilliant and accomplished jurists ever nominated to the bench, was obviously to blame for not quitting her job earlier, even though the Senate had been under Republican blockade since 2014 and RBG had still been in perfectly good health at that time. HOW DARE SHE NOT SEE THE FUTURE AND QUIT NOW!!! HORRIBLE! TERRIBLE! TARNISHING HER LEGACY!!! Clearly she should have left six years ago, because obviously McConnell would have given her successor a fair hearing and there’s no way that relying only on one elderly justice to survive multiple bouts with cancer to protect the civil rights of an entire country can backfire. Nah, forget all that sexism stuff, this is RBG’s fault alone for not quitting a job to which she had a lifetime appointment and was still more than qualifed to do. Oh, and at the time, nobody was yelling at BREYER to retire, even though he was only a few years younger. He likewise refused to do so until just this year, clearing the way for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination. Breyer was a fine jurist and served well, but he wasn’t RBG. Yet something… let’s see… being a man…. stopped him from being subjected to the same WHY DIDN’T RBG RETIRE NOW!! drumbeat.
Of course, because Republicans have absolutely no principles apart from the ruthless pursuit of power, and even though millions of people were already voting in the November 2020 election, Mitch McConnell forgot everything he had ever said about not confirming SCOTUS justices during an election year. RBG died on September 18, and the GOP-controlled Senate jammed Judge Handmaid, Amy Coney Barrett, onto the bench on October 26, barely a week before the November 3 general election. So let’s see! That makes five justices – Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – appointed by a Republican who lost the popular vote and yet, thanks to the Electoral College, became president anyway. Two of them (Gorsuch and Barrett) were forced onto the bench after deliberate manipulations by McConnell to make sure that Democrats couldn’t fill the seat at any cost. With the exception of Roberts, they all just voted to overturn Roe, and after all three Trump appointees assured the Judiciary Committee that it was settled law. They joined Thomas, who is currently embroiled in one of the biggest judicial ethics scandals in the history of the Court, but nah, who cares about that.
So anyway, we now have the RBG Is To Blame For This crowd out in force, because losing women’s rights has to be a woman’s fault somehow, as if that argument remotely makes the smallest amount of sense. Not content to leave it there, Schmidt also decided to bag on Dianne Feinstein for contributing to making politics “sclerotic, geriatric, and extreme.” Should Feinstein retire? Yes. Did she disappoint Democrats by lending legitimacy to the Kavanaugh and Barrett hearings? Undoubtedly. Is it utterly, utterly absurd and reeking of desperation to accuse RUTH BADER GINSBURG AND DIANNE FEINSTEIN of being at fault for the Republicans loading the court with extremists thanks to unelected presidents who squeaked out Electoral College wins, and which represents the culmination of a decades-long political strategy to punish women and undo the entire hard-fought gains of the feminist movement?
Yes. Yes, it goddamn fucking is. Shut up, Steve Schmidt, and anyone else who thinks he’s making a Savvy Political Point that Shows How Both Sides are Bad. Shut up forever. Thanks.
2087
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