Mitch McConnell Is Spending the Shutdown Confirming More Trump Judges

Mitch McConnell Is Spending the Shutdown Confirming More Trump Judges
The president’s record-shattering 84 confirmed judges are already 76 percent male and 91 percent white. The next six are also all white men.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/mcconnell-shutdown-judge-confirmations-trump.html

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Senate Republicans have also apparently been mulling the idea of a rules change that would allow them to move even faster on judicial nominations, with Sen. Todd Young, R-Indiana, telling Hugh Hewitt on Monday that the GOP conference may soon consider different ideas for ways to cut down debate time on Trump’s mountain of judicial nominees. The government shutdown has now dragged into its 33rd day, but the Republican obsession with jamming judges through continues to comically accelerate. It is starting to have the distinct feeling of a post-apocalypse smash-and-grab, by white men, for white men, to ensure that whatever is left of government post-Trump goes to team Handmaid’s Tale.

Trump’s boosters continue to tell us that there is nothing troubling about the fact that his judicial picks are almost 80 percent male and 90 percent white. It’s essentializing to assume that one’s gender or race makes a difference to one’s judicial fitness and philosophy, they say. Indeed, we’re probably just days out from hearing that, per House Minority Whip Steve Scalise’s, R-Louisiana, logic, the lack of female candidates is Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fault. (Last week Scalise blamed Nancy Pelosi for the fact that most House Republicans are white men.)

The interest in ramming judges through has only picked up since the midterm elections. “If the Democrats had acquired a majority in the Senate, they could have blocked every person President Trump nominated for federal judgeships,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed post-election, noting that judicial appointments were “the biggest achievement of Trump’s first two years, and now it is likely guaranteed to continue.” Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, told Politico at the time that “Executive orders don’t outlast the president, legislation can change, but these judgeships last a long time,” adding that there are “a lot of Never-Trumpers and conservatives who have had to admit, sometimes begrudgingly, that ‘Wow, this has been a home run.’ ”

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Even as he hides from and deflects the devastation caused by Trump and Trumpism, McConnell seems sanguine about the fact that the one institution he truly cares about—and let’s be clear it is the judiciary, not the Senate—will be the thing that emerges from the rubble: As Homans puts it, “The shutdown distilled the essence of McConnell’s position in Trump’s Washington: a man of institutions and establishments whose own legacy was now tied to that of a president who seems hellbent on burning both to the ground.”

In some sense, then, McConnell is behaving perfectly rationally. His approach—screw the shutdown, screw the Russia interference, and screw any attempt to protect the franchise, we will eventually win in the courts—is just a mirror image of the approach many Trump opponents, including myself, have taken throughout the past two years (which is to focus on all that other stuff, because for now, the courts appear to be holding). But while progressives still hope that an independent judiciary will act as a check on Donald Trump, McConnell is taking a longer view—doing something rather more apocalyptic and decidedly more cynical. He continues to pack the judicial branch with extremely young, radically conservative white Christian men who will—assuming constitutional democracy survives—continue to deliver wins on gun rights and anti-abortion rights as well as the deregulation of environmental, consumer, labor, and other safeguards, long after Trump leaves office. These picks will also continue to work to circumscribe the vote itself, through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and limitless money in politics.

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