Ezra Klein is no fan of President Trump or Republicans. Nevertheless, today he writes for Vox about the impact Mitch McConnell has had on the Senate and on politics more generally. While doing so, he shares an important insight about structural changes in our two-party system.
[The] McConnell rule: What parties have the power and authority to do, they should do. And to give him his due: It is much stranger, by the standards of most political systems, for the reverse to be the case, for senators to refuse to use their power to pursue their ideological ends on a question as important as a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. But that’s how American politics has traditionally worked.
It worked that way because the parties, and their Supreme Court nominees, were different than they are now. The parties were ideologically mixed rather than ideologically polarized, and Supreme Court nominees were ideologically unpredictable rather than heavily vetted and ideologically consistent. From the 1950s through the 1990s, knowing the party that nominated a justice told you little about how that justice would vote. All of that lowered the stakes on each nomination.
Today, we have ideologically disciplined coalitions naming their most reliable foot soldiers to lifetime appointments to the most powerful judicial body in the land. Those changes predate McConnell; his contribution was taking them to their logical conclusion in the Senate: Treat Supreme Court nominees like any other major ideological vote, and do whatever you need to do to win.
There were once conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, those days are long gone. McConnell recognizes the implications thereof and acts accordingly. His doing so also reflects Republican resentment of a liberal SCOTUS that “invented” social changes no legislature ever approved.
