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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday at the age of 87, was a giant of American public life. The tributes have arrived, the mourners have gathered in the court of Washington, their steps strewn with flowers.
Tributes and memorials will continue. But now that it belongs to the ages, the politics of the Trump era can, and will, take things from here.
“My most fervent wish,” said justice days before his death on Friday, “is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed. “
It may not be, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are going to try.
There are 45 days until the election and confirmations are long and tense things, as Brett Kavanaugh demonstrated in 2018. But even if Trump loses to Joe Biden on November 3, and the Democrats win back the Senate, there is a pathetic period until the inauguration in late January. Republicans in the Senate require a simple majority to place a solid fifth conservative, if Chief Justice John Roberts is taken by a wobble, as some on the right do, in the highest court.
The statements and opinions of key Republican senators are now in the spotlight.
Lindsey Graham, chair of the judicial committee and avid Trump ally facing a tough fight for re-election in South Carolina, said this in 2016, when McConnell refused to give The election of Barack Obama to replace Antonin Scalia, Merrick Garland, even as much as an audience:
I want you to use my words against me. If there is a Republican president … and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, Lindsey Graham can be said to have said: ‘Let the next president, whoever he is, make that nomination.‘”
Lisa Murkowski of Atlanta, a moderate who has faced Trump before, had this to say shortly before Ginsburg’s death: “I would not vote to confirm a supreme court candidate. We are 50 days away from an election. “
Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate who has raised concerns about any threat to abortion rights, is way down in her re-election race.
Mitt Romney of Utah is not ready for re-election, but he was the only Republican who voted to impeach Trump. They will also watch you closely.
Of course, the word of the average Republican senator, the average politician, to be fair, is not worth the tweet it’s written on or the microphone it’s hastily spoken on. A battle royal is on the way in Washington. Here’s Lauren Gambino:
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