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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not often write opinion pieces for publication, so when the Kentucky Republican’s byline appears alongside an op-ed, it tends to raise a few eyebrows. That’s especially true when the GOP leader addresses one of his favorite subjects: the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was nearly two years ago, for example, when McConnell wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, emphasizing his purported support for “judicial independence,” while celebrating the “impartiality” of the high court as the source of its legitimacy. This was, of course, one of the more brazen displays of hypocrisy in recent memory.
The Republican lawmaker nevertheless returned to the Post’s opinion page again yesterday, with a related piece featuring a memorable headline: “Neither party can count on the Supreme Court to be its ally.” The point of McConnell’s piece was to emphasize the justices’ ideological unpredictability.
After pointing to a handful of rulings in which conservatives were disappointed by the most far-right Supreme Court in roughly a century, the Senate minority leader concluded:
When Democrats complain about a crisis at the court, the crisis they see is its refusal to reliably advance their party’s priorities. They bemoan a conservative majority that puts jurisprudence above politics. Well, the evidence suggests that anyone who expects the court to function as a mere extension of legislative power is bound to be disappointed. This latest term demonstrates that no party wins or loses before the Supreme Court every time.
Broadly speaking, there are a couple of ways to assess an opinion piece like this. First and foremost, of course, is the substance of McConnell’s arguments and the cases he cited in his op-ed. Not surprisingly, the senator’s argument falls far short on this front, as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained in an exceptional analysis this morning.
“Mitch McConnell must think anyone reading his new opinion piece on the Supreme Court’s just-concluded term is an idiot,” Jordan explained.
But there’s another angle to this that stood out for me: the disconnect between the message and the messenger.
Revisiting our coverage from a couple of years ago, it’s easy to forget that few, if any, Americans have ever done more to politicize the judiciary in general, and the Supreme Court specifically, than McConnell.
It was in February 2016, for example when then-Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. Then-President Barack Obama nominated then-Judge Merrick Garland, a center-left, compromise jurist — who’d received praise from Senate Republicans — to fill the vacancy, which in turn opened the door to a historic opportunity to stop the high court’s drift to the right.
McConnell instead decided to impose an unprecedented high-court blockade for nearly a year, hoping that Americans might elect a Republican president and Republican Congress despite the GOP’s abusive tactics.
It worked: McConnell effectively stole a Supreme Court seat from one administration and handed it to another. He’s repeatedly boasted about the pride he takes in having executed the transgressive scheme.
The Kentucky Republican made matters much worse by confirming Justice Amy Comey Barrett the week before Election Day 2020 — abandoning the principles McConnell pretended to care about four years earlier — even after millions of voters had already cast their ballots.
More recently, the Republican also hung out with Justice Clarence Thomas at a political organization’s event and praised the justice’s work on a controversial issue that the Supreme Court was poised to consider.
“Neither party can count on the Supreme Court to be its ally”? McConnell has spent much of the last decade in pursuit of a simple goal: ensuring that justices are aligned with Republican politics, and molding the bench accordingly.
If the minority leader doesn’t want to be laughed at, he should make fewer ridiculous arguments.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.