"This isn’t governance; it is the unhinged tantrum of a party whose ideological rigidity has already paralyzed Congress, and now threatens the Supreme Court itself."

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The Senate Defers to the N.R.A.
By New York Times Editorial Board, March 24, 2016

It turns out that the most important voice in the Supreme Court nomination battle is not the American people’s, as Senate Republicans have insisted from the moment Justice Antonin Scalia died last month. It is not even that of the senators. It’s the National Rifle Association’s.

That is what the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the other day when asked about the possibility of considering and confirming President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, after the November elections. “I can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame-duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

Put aside the absurd rationales Senate Republicans have trotted out for not holding a hearing on the Garland nomination, and consider how extreme this latest position is. As long as Republicans control the Senate, Mr. McConnell says, they will delegate their judgment to the N.R.A.’s paranoid far-right lobbyists, whom nobody elected, and who staunchly oppose measures, like universal background checks, supported by 90 percent of Americans — and three-quarters of N.R.A. members.

Mr. McConnell says he wants the next president to fill the vacancy. But if a Democrat wins the election, the N.R.A. will surely oppose any person he or she nominates. What will Mr. McConnell and his caucus do then?

In other words, forget the voters. Forget that Judge Garland has been supported and praised by top Republicans and Democrats for years. The N.R.A. doesn’t like him — for no fact-based reason — and that’s all that matters.

It is hard to calculate the damage Republicans are doing to the nation and the court, even as poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans believe the Senate should hold hearings and an up-or-down vote.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., a conservative, has spoken out against the increasing politicization of the nomination process. Ten days before Justice Scalia’s death, he said at a public forum, “Look at my more recent colleagues, all extremely well qualified for the court,” referring to Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “The votes were, I think, strictly on party lines for the last three of them, or close to it, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

His remarks seemed to come out of another era, back when the Senate confirmed nominees like Justice Scalia in 1986 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 by unanimous or near-unanimous votes.

The process has been deteriorating for a while, but the current Republican caucus has now driven it off the rails. Under its twisted logic, there is no reason for the Senate ever to consider a nominee from a president of the opposing party. To do so, the members seem to suggest, would be doing the president a favor. This isn’t governance; it is the unhinged tantrum of a party whose ideological rigidity has already paralyzed Congress, and now threatens the Supreme Court itself.
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