Compare the statements, trumps speech on 1/6 for over an hour and Schumers....Down at the bottom.
The controversy over Chuck Schumer’s attack on Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, explained
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Supreme Court tirade is a symptom of America’s democratic decline.by Ian Millhiser
Mar 5, 2020, 11:40 AM EST
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer speaking at an abortion rights rally outside of the Supreme Court on March 4, 2020. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
Here’s a fuller excerpt of what Schumer actually said:
The full picture Schumer paints here is one of Republican coordination. Republican state lawmakers enact anti-abortion laws. A Republican president and Republican senators fill the bench with Republican judges and Republican justices. And then those Republican justices play their part in this larger machine by upholding the anti-abortion laws.
Read in this way, the “price” Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will pay could be that they will see their party driven from power and many of the cogs of their partisan machine broken.
Consider the past four years from Democrats’ perspective. Almost exactly four years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia died. The incumbent Democratic president at the time, Barack Obama, won two national elections — winning a majority of the popular vote each time. Meanwhile, while Republicans controlled the Senate in 2016, they did so solely due to Senate malapportionment. The 46 senators in the Democratic caucus represented nearly 20 million more people than the 54-senator Republican “majority.”
And yet, Republicans refused to give Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy left by Scalia’s death, a confirmation hearing or a vote. Senate Republicans held that vacancy open for a year, until President Trump — a man who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots — could fill it.
Only two people in American history have been nominated to the Supreme Court by a president who lost the popular vote, then confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country. The first is Neil Gorsuch. The second is Brett Kavanaugh.
Indeed, tucked into Schumer’s largely inarticulate threat against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh is a subtle dig at the latter man. Just as Schumer said that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh “released the whirlwind,” Kavanaugh, during an angry moment where it seemed that his chance of sitting on the Supreme Court was slipping away from him, told Senate Democrats that they have “sowed the wind” and that “the country will reap the whirlwind.”
So Schumer most likely believes that the judiciary is rigged against Democrats because the judiciary is rigged against Democrats. And that entirely understandable perception is a poison that threatens the heart of American democracy.
The authoritarian death spiral
What’s truly troubling about Schumer’s statement is that it is a symptom of a deeper rot in American democracy.Democratic governments, Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, depend as much on informal norms as they do upon constitutional rules. There is no law requiring the party that controls the Senate to give a confirmation hearing to a Supreme Court nominee of the other party.
Nor is there any meaningful check on how Supreme Court justices read the Constitution — American history is riddled with implausibly reasoned Supreme Court decisions blessing racism, oppressive treatment of workers, and voter suppression. When the Supreme Court’s avoided such exercises of raw power, that’s typically because the Court has restrained itself.
There also isn’t any law prohibiting United States senators from making vaguely menacing statements about Supreme Court justices.
The controversy over Chuck Schumer’s attack on Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, explained
Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Supreme Court tirade is a symptom of America’s democratic decline.
www.vox.com
