WaPo's Congressional Reporter Does Not Understand Importance Of Merrick Garland

Paul Kane over at the Washington Post wrote one of the most disingenuous articles I have seen in a while with his analysis of what might happen with the Neil Gorsuch confirmation.

Kane highlights Democrat Senator Tom Carper and Republican Senator Roger Wicker who both believe that Democrats will filibuster the Gorsuch nomination and McConnell and the Republicans will then unilaterally change the rules and allow his confirmation by just a majority vote, invoking the “nuclear option”. According to Kane, “The purpose of the [60 vote] rule is to promote bipartisanship and consensus, which in turn creates legitimacy and buy-in for policy and governance. If the filibuster goes away, so does yet another layer of collegiality in Congress — and another way to shore up Washington’s credibility…And once both sides are guilty of breaching that standard on nominations, it would seem to be only a matter of time before a future majority obliterates filibusters on other legislation.” Kane believes that this would be a negative for the country, with some degree of justification.

Kane details how we got to this point, starting with Harry Reid’s decision to change Senate rules with just a simple majority in 2013, rather than a vote of two-thirds of the body. Reid’s rule change required just a majority vote for judicial nominees but left the filibuster in place for the Supreme Court. Kane seems to think this was a critical turning point and, again, you can’t necessarily disagree with that.

But Kane never mentions that Reid was responding to Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominations. I’ll offer up just one example of that obstruction that is extreme but also typical. GOP Senator Thom Tillis put a hold on a seat on the Federal District Court for Eastern District of North Carolina for the entirety of Obama’s term. In fact the seat remained unfilled for over a decade. In addition, the GOP refused to move forward on any of Obama’s three nominees for the DC Court of Appeals which would have swung that court to liberals. And Republicans specifically did not block these nominees because of their qualifications. The DC Court is probably the most powerful and important court in the country, with the exception of the Supreme Court. Kane, however, neglects to mention any of this history, painting Reid’s action as a purely partisan move.

Kane continues his analysis by claiming that Democrats’ objections to Gorsuch, who he says “[i]n another time…might have been considered the consensus candidate”, by saying “there is a sense of raw politics in Democrats’ growing opposition to Gorsuch, because liberal anti-Trump activists are pushing Democrats to oppose every Trump move…[S]ome Democrats think the bigger political penalty would be to disappoint their base by allowing an easy confirmation this time.”

I think now might be a good time to mention that Kane has not yet mentioned Merrick Garland once in the article to this point. In fact, you have to get down to paragraph 17, after he has declared that Democrats are engaging in “raw politics” over Gorsuch that he brings up what happened to Merrick Garland. Worse, Kane refuses to categorize the treatment of Garland at all, unlike his comment on partisan nature of Democrats. Instead he quotes Tom Carper saying, “I have a very hard time getting over what was done to Merrick Garland, a very hard time..That’s a wrong that should be righted, we have a chance to do that, and it won’t be by confirming Judge Gorsuch the first time through.” And he simply leaves the issue there.

Kane finishes his piece with these lines. “That [negotiating to let Gorsuch be confirmed in return for allowing a future filibuster] would set the filibuster in motion. And almost like Cold War generals mapping out war games, Republicans say they would be compelled to respond in kind. Otherwise Democrats would have set a new precedent for blocking a Supreme Court nominee.” This is just a straight out fabrication. Filibustering Supreme Court nominees has always been an option and there is precedent for its use. Simply negotiating to allow a future filibuster is NOT setting a new precedent. What would be setting a new precedent is for Republicans to vote to use the “nuclear option” in order to get Gorsuch, a Supreme Court nominee, confirmed.

Paul Kane is the Washington Post’s senior congressional correspondent. It is shocking and remarkable that he does not seem to understand the centrality of Merrick Garland to the opposition to Neil Gorsuch. For the first time in 40 years, Democrats had a chance to finally tilt the balance of the Court to liberals and that chance was stolen by Republicans. There is no other word for it. And despite the comments of people like Kane and Susan Collins, who says, “it is not fair to Judge Gorsuch to deny him a straight up-or-down vote based on what happened with Merrick Garland”, Democrats can and will never forget.

With the advent of Citizens United, there are now hundreds of media sources that are virtual propaganda machines. Just look at the nexus of the Mercers and Breitbart or the whole Murdoch media empire. And with big data and sophisticated targeting, Russians and other propagandists can target certain users for more easily than in the past. At some point, the powerful mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times are going to have decide whether they want to defend our country and that means defending “truth”. It also means not publishing deliberately misleading stories like the one Paul Kane just wrote.