April 18, 2024

Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell reached the pinnacle of hypocrisy when claimed the Senate had reached an "unfortunate precedent" over the House impeachment of Mayorkas, ignoring his own past behavior.

After the Senate dismissed two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, the turtle was upset.

We've set a very unfortunate precedent here. This means that the Senate can ignore, in effect, the House's impeachment. It doesn't make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not. He was. And by doing what we just did, we have, in effect, ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial. That no evidence, no procedure. This is a day that's not a proud day in the history of the Senate

Let's remind Mitch and the entire Republican/MAGA infrastructure of what McConnell did in the past to destroy the integrity of Supreme Court nominations..

In March 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to justify denying a vote on Obama’s nomination of DC Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia: “All we are doing is following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.”

There is no such tradition. The table shows the nine Supreme Court vacancies in place during election years in the Court’s post-Civil War era—once Congress stabilized the Court’s membership at nine and the justices largely stopped serving as trial judges in the old circuit courts. Those nine election-year vacancies (out of over 70 in the period) were all filled in the election year—one by a 1956 uncontested recess appointment and eight by Senate confirmation.
Bottom line: there was no historical justification for denying Garland a vote; thus, voting for Trump’s late-2020 nominee is hypocritical.

Then McConnell topped that one by refusing to adhere to his own proclamation that the Senate never fills a vacant seat during an election year by putting Justice Amy Coney Barrett on October 26th, 2020, almost as soon as Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and right before the 2020 election.

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