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Our government is so hopelessly divided right now.  I don’t even know why Congress is even debating this - Republicans cannot be swayed on this or anything else, and they clearly just don’t care if pre-existing conditions destroy the lives of their constituents.  This lady will be confirmed by a sleazy process that was bastardized by Republicans.  They will act like any assertions from the left are overreactions, then they will act surprised when the assertions come true and point fingers everywhere but at themselves.

When Democrats get the opportunity they will play hardball and exact revenge, as they should.  Rinse and repeat.  It is a travesty that the money that is taken out of your paycheck is what funds this garbage reality.  One of the anecdotal stories today involved someone with a condition that requires $500,000 worth of medical care to treat each year.  Not a single person in that clusterfuck of government mismanagement even recognized what the real problem is - that any medical treatment should cost anywhere near that much in the first place.  All they are concerned about is who pays for it and whether every citizen should have the same privilege of getting equally raped by our hopelessly fucked healthcare industry.

Democrats didn't start the process by going nuclear on judicial nominations? Screw them. If the positions were reversed each time the Democrats wouldn't hesitate to do whatever was in their own best interests.

The hypocrisy is a two way street. Dems were screaming for Obama's nominee to be brought to a vote and passed. Those self same Democrats are now screaming to wait until after elections.

Of course they are also threatening to pack the Supreme Court with 4 or 5 liberal justices to make sure they get their way. They really care about precedence and the law.

As for the hyperbole that she will overturn the PPACA. If it was such a great law it wouldn't be getting shredded now. The Democrat's moronic gamble of trying to tax those that did not participate by purchasing a insurance plan from a commercial entity was rendered null and void when the Republicans reduced the effective tax rate to 0. W/O that fundamental part of the law it cannot stand. That is what happens when one side crams through a piece of shit law; and hopes they keep the White House to keep it a float.  

Democrats knew the law was a POS; but did absolutely nothing to fix it.

This article - like so many arguments we hear on this topic - conflates morality with legality. You want to say there is hypocrisy? That's fine. You can argue McConnell is a hypocrite. I think there is a stronger argument that Lindsey Graham is a hypocrite. But there is hypocrisy to spare on all sides. Democrats are hypocrites for insisting four years ago that the Senate must hold confirmations while objecting that what McConnell was doing was not valid, and yet now complaining that we should hold off on hearings now because what McConnell did was valid and set some kind of binding precedent.

None of this is about constitutionality. It's pure politics - which is to say: pure bullshit. The authors are just whining because they aren't getting what they want.

His naked hypocrisy threatens the future credibility of our federal judiciary.

No it doesn't. His hypocrisy is his and his alone. The judiciary is not impacted by it and will be just fine. Democrats love to fear-monger, though, so anything they don't like is a "threat to democracy." Chicken Little called and he wants you to stop ripping off his material.

we are united in our opposition to the rushed nomination, hearing, and confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court

"Rushed?" Based on what metric? Several justices have been considered much faster than the process Judge Barrett will be going through.

Our concern is not related to the qualifications of Judge Barrett.

Then you should stop pretending the Judiciary is under threat or that the timing of the Senate considering her nomination matters in any way. What should matter is her qualifications. Period. The authors stipulate to her qualifications, so we should proceed.

we believe that the process being pursued is fundamentally unfair

The process being pursued conforms to the Constitution. That is what matters. Too typical of many on the Left these days (and 1st graders) is that "fairness" is measured by equity of outcome. But that is not what fairness is.

and will greatly undermine public trust upon which our democracy depends

Two major things undermine public trust in our system. First is people in both parties politicizing the Supreme Court members, rather than respecting their records as judges. Second is the way Congress has abdicated its responsibility to craft legislation. Instead, they rely on the Court to do their work for them, which feeds into the first point.

the American people will unavoidably see the Supreme Court as just another forum for power politics and political players

Many already do - for the reasons stated above.

When McConnell set a new standard for how the Senate would proceed with a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, the American people understood that this new rule would be applied consistently should another vacancy to which it clearly applies arise on McConnell's watch.

The American people understood no such thing. Nobody with half a brain (in my opinion) thought McConnell was doing something that would actually be respected as legally binding on anyone in the future. If Democrats were in the position the Republicans are in, they would be doing exactly the same thing.

McConnell's arbitrary application of rules

Senate rules are already pretty arbitrary. However, what McConnell did was just make a call on whether or not to take action on the nomination. The Senate didn't create a rule.

will powerfully testify that the Republicans who control the Senate have no respect for the consistent application of legal rules,

It is dishonest to suggest that Republicans are breaking a rule. No rule has been cited. No rule has been broken. Not Senate rules, and particularly not legal rules.

And as we've seen throughout history, democracies crumble when people lose faith in them.

There we are again. Blah blah blah "threat to democracy." Hyperbole on Parade. If anyone loses faith in democracy, it will be because people like these authors keep telling them they should lose faith.

Just think of the consequences for credibility

Rigggghhht. Because politicians haven't spent the last several years attacking the credibility of the Court whenever it produces an opinion they don't like.

"Rushed?" Based on what metric? Several justices have been considered much faster than the process Judge Barrett will be going through.

Trump wants to rush it so much he said today that Graham is giving the Democrats too much time to talk. 

What Trump wants doesn't concern me. He wants what he wants, and rants what he wants, but the Senate will do as it will. Like many, he thinks a Justice Barrett will be some kind of magic scroll unlocking all his political hopes and dreams. I wouldn't count on it, though.

So far, there is nothing unusual about her nomination or the hearings, except that so few are actually present. But that's Covid's fault.

I wouldn't count on it, though.

I agree.

When Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate, expanding the Supreme Court to 15 Justices and allowing Biden to immediately appoint 6 new Justices would save the Supreme Court.

That works....

expanding the Supreme Court to 15 Justices

Nothing Trump or the Republicans can do would undermine faith in the Court as much as expanding (i.e. packing) it would.

There is no constitutional, legal or moral reason why the Supreme Court should not be expanded.  The Republicans have stacked it with hard-right ideologues.  The American people will have much more faith in a Supreme Court that is not a reactionary play pen.

The Republicans have stacked it with hard-right ideologues.

Have they?  Chief Justice Roberts for one has made some decisions that don't really fit the description of a "hard-right ideologue".  What makes you think they are any more or less politically motivated in their decisions than any of the other justices since the time of FDR?

re is no constitutional, legal or moral reason why the Supreme Court should not be expanded. 

Really? You can't think of a single reason. Not one reason occurs to you why packing the Court with ideologues might be a bad idea?

The American people will have much more faith in a Supreme Court that is not a reactionary play pen.

So in your world, adding explicitly partisan justices to a Court that is the most popular institution in Washington (58% approval rating ) will make somehow make it more popular and not perceived as partisan? 

Amazing.

Yes, they have.

The Republicans have stacked the courts with ideologues, not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well.  It is very bad and dangerous for our country.

So in your world, stacking the Court with explicitly partisan justices as the Republicans have done is not perceived as turning it into a partisan institution?   Stacking the lower courts with partisan and unqualified judges is not perceived as partisan corruption of the judicial system?

Astonishing.

The Republicans have stacked the courts with ideologues, not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. 

So now you are trying to conflate stacking the Courts (filling vacancies) with packing the Court, adding justices to achieve political ends. Do you want to switch topics? Filling judicial vacancies is what Presidents and the Senate do. There's nothing unusual about "stacking" if you want to call it that.

In your world, do you imagine Obama didn't nominate liberal judges? Or that Biden won't?  To believe Trump has "stacked the court with ideologues" is simply nonsensical.  Trump justices like gorsuch and Kavanaugh, are the ones who reach across the aisle to provide the block voting democratic ideologues with fifth votes. The Court needs more independent thinkers like them, not party hacks like Democratic Presidents nominate. 

If you actually cared about not having ideologues on the Court, you wouldn't let the Democrats nominate another justice again. 

The problem with your argument is reality. The Court's opinions  are available to the public. Whether its been Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, O'Connor Kavanaugh or Gorsuch, it's been the Republican justices whose votes aren't predictable by the latest piece of party fundraising. They aren't the ones, like Ginsburg, who's start with a result and work backwards to find a justification.  The court is viewed positively because of the Republican judges.  Results are not predetermined because a majority were nominated by Republican Presidents.

There is no constitutional, legal or moral reason why the Supreme Court should not be expanded.

Unless you can propose a constitutional or legal reason why it should be expanded, then it is probably immoral. Consider what you are trying to achieve. You don't want impartial judges deciding cases based on the law. You want judges rubber stamping the things you believe.

Is that what many Republicans want? Of course. But they are doing it by simply filling existing vacancies. You want to keep throwing more judges at it until you get the result you want.

What if you get a couple of judges on the court you think are liberal, and they rule against you? Then what? Impeach them? Add more judges? Maybe this time you could just name committed liberals to the court. Nominate Nancy Pelosi or AOC. They're sure to be objective, right? Heck, no need to even bother with anyone with any training in the law. Just appoint your favorite activists.

Packing the court just to change the results sends you down a slippery slope that will just destroy any credibility the courts have.

The Republicans have stacked it with hard-right ideologues.

The Republicans have not stacked it at all. They have replaced existing vacancies through the Constitutionally defined process. 

guaranteed if Republicans tried to pack SCOTUS, those on the left would scream bloody murder.

anyone pretending that packing SCOTUS is a good idea are deluding themselves.

The Republicans have stacked the courts with ideologues, not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well.  It is very bad and dangerous for our country.

Check out the list here .  This sort of thing really took off during FDR's administrations.  President Obama made 328 appointments, 313 of which are still active, 3rd on the list behind Reagan and Clinton in total number of appointments, and still way out in front in terms of active judges and by FAR the greatest number of active circuit and district judges.  Trump so far has not even kept pace.  Both parties since FDR have made a growing effort to appoint as many federal judges as possible, so calling out the Republicans in particular is very much unwarranted and dare I say intellectually dishonest.  BOTH parties need  to quit treating the judiciary as a breeding ground for partisan politics and attempting to "legislate from the bench" especially at the Supreme Court level, IMHO.  The Supreme Court in particular needs to remain strictly concerned about Constitutional matters, and partisan politics should not weigh into important judicial decisions. 

The past precedence for nominating and confirming SC justices in an election year should remain intact and efforts to thwart that due to partisan concerns should not enter into the equation.  Nominations and confirmations as always should be based on those qualified to make unbiased decisions on Constitutional matters, and a proven track record of such impartiality.  And threatening to pack the court because the other party is simply following precedent is particularly hyper-partisan and egregious on it's face.  

Yes, they have.

Obama made 328 total appointments including 2 confirmed to the Supreme Court.  What sort of ideologues do you think he stacked those courts with?  Either be upset with the whole idea of court stacking, and call out both parties, or your argument fails to achieve any sort of higher moral ground, or basis for outrage.

anyone pretending that packing SCOTUS is a good idea are deluding themselves.

Even Justice Ginsburg was against court packing. 

npr

If Joe Biden wins, he should pack the courts, it's only fair.  

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The American people will have much more faith in a Supreme Court that is not a reactionary play pen.

Indeed, and that is precisely what packing the court makes it, a reactionary playpen.  FDR tried to do that to ram through his New Deal policies, and thankfully that was avoided.  He got his nine justice appointments anyway during his tenure but by filling the seats that became available naturally in accordance with historical precedent, just as Trump now has.

In the 29 times vacancies have developed in an election year (some even after the election in the lame duck session) the historical precedent has been that nominations are confirmed by the Senate when the Senate majority and the President are of the same party, and the nominations are NOT confirmed (held over for the winner of the election) when the Senate majority and President are of different parties.  More detail and facts in my comment #5 below . It has worked this way for over 200 years to the benefit of BOTH parties.  Calls to disrupt the process and precedent based on partisan concerns, and certainly to later retaliate by packing the court, is precisely the reactionary sort of response that the American people should fear.  Trump is simply filling seats that have opened during his time as president, as stipulated by the Constitution and over 200 years of procedural precedent, just as have 44 Presidents before him.

My opinion is that court packing would be wrong. If Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate and do expand the Supreme Court, what would prevent an eventual Republican President and Senate to add another ten justices? Where does it end up?

, what would prevent an eventual Republican President and Senate to add another ten justices? Where does it end up?

That doesn't occur to them.  Just like it didn't occur to them that nuking the judicial  filibuster would hurt them. They think  if they control Congress today, they will control it forever.  

Regardless of who we feel the hypocrites are, the facts in this matter are these:

1.  The so-called 'Biden Rule" in 1992 was the exact same argument made by the Republicans in March of 2016 when they refused to hear or vote on Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in Obama's lame duck end of second term.  In both cases the Senate was controlled by the opposite party of the departing/incumbent president, and hence the precedent was to delay the confirmation of the Supreme justice until the new president came into office, just as it had been the precedent before that in American history (as indicated in the next fact).  This is decidedly NOT the same case as we have now with President Trump and the Senate majority being of the same party. In that case, the historical precedent has been for a president to make a nomination and the Senate to confirm it, even within an election year and in some cases even after the election (see link in the next fact).  McConnell has maintained that same reasoning in both 2016 and now in 2020, and it is consistent with historical precedent.

2.  The historical precedent and traditional norms from the founding of the country regarding Supreme Court nominations by the President and the hearing and confirmation by the Senate during an election year all indicate that the Republicans both should, and indeed have a duty to, nominate and confirm a Supreme Court Justice in 2020.  This is not in any way the same situation as Obama's nomination of Garland in 2016 when the the opposite party controlled the Senate.   The historical facts are laid out in detail in the well cited article   HERE   . 

a.  In cases where the President and Senate majority were of opposing parties:

There have been ten vacancies resulting in a presidential election-year or post-election nomination when the president and Senate were from opposite parties. In six of the ten cases, a nomination was made before Election Day. Only one of those, Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s nomination by Grover Cleveland in 1888, was confirmed before the election. Four nominations were made in lame-duck sessions after the election; three of those were left open for the winner of the election. Other than the unusual Fuller nomination (made when the Court was facing a crisis of backlogs in its docket), three of the other nine were filled after Election Day in ways that rewarded the winner of the presidential contest.  The norm in these cases strongly favored holding the seat open for the conflict between the two branches to be resolved by the presidential election. That is what Republicans did in 2016. The voters had created divided government, and the Senate was within its historical rights to insist on an intervening election to decide the power struggle. Had there been no conflict between the branches to submit to the voters for resolution, there would have been no reason for delay.

b.  In cases where the President and Senate majority were of the same party:

So what does history say about   this   situation, where a president is in his last year in office, his party controls the Senate, and the branches are not in conflict? Once again, historical practice and tradition provides a clear and definitive answer: In the absence of divided government, election-year nominees get confirmed.

Nineteen times between 1796 and 1968, presidents have sought to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential-election year while their party controlled the Senate. Ten of those nominations came before the election; nine of the ten were successful, the only failure being the    bipartisan filibuster of the ethically challenged Abe Fortas as chief justice in 1968  .

Nine times, presidents have made nominations   after   the election in a lame-duck session. These include some storied nominations, such as John Adams picking Chief Justice John Marshall in 1801 and Abraham Lincoln selecting Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase in 1864. Of the nine, the only one that did not succeed was Washington’s 1793 nomination of William Paterson, which was withdrawn for technical reasons and resubmitted and confirmed the first day of the next Congress (Paterson had helped draft the Judiciary Act of 1789 creating the Court, and the Constitution thus required his term as a senator to end before he could be appointed to the Court). Two of Andrew Jackson’s nominees on the last day of his term were confirmed a few days later, without quibbles. In no case did the Senate reject a nominee or refuse to act on a nomination; why would they? Three of the presidents who filled lame-duck vacancies — Adams, Martin Van Buren, and Benjamin Harrison — had already lost reelection.

The final conclusion given the absolute facts in this matter are well-stated:

The bottom line: If a president and the Senate agree on a Supreme Court nominee, timing has never stopped them. By tradition, only when the voters have elected a president and a Senate majority from different parties has the fact of a looming presidential election mattered. When there is no dispute between the branches, there is no need to ask the voters to resolve one.

I hope this clears up this matter.

Another interesting observation is this.  It was almost a unanimous forgone conclusion through much of 2016 and all the way up to election day that Hillary Clinton would be the next President and that she is the one who would fill that 2016 SC vacancy.  The Republicans did not have much to gain from delaying the Garland confirmation process, other than to follow the precedent that had been set for two centuries and benefitted both parties over those years.  If Democrats thought differently then why didn't they make a bigger stink of it in 2016, or make it a larger campaign issue?

The Court of Supreme Beings impugned itself when it ( legalized ) Citizens United.  Since that time the court has half-heartedly maintained certain American rights and privilege while full heartedly trying to diminish them. 

When McConnell set a new standard for how the Senate would proceed with a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, the American people understood that this new rule would be applied consistently should another vacancy to which it clearly applies arise on McConnell's watch.

He did not set a new standard, he in fact followed historical precedent both in 2016 and now.  See comment 5 above.

The legitimacy of the judicial branch rests on the principle that judges are independent and unbiased interpreters of the law. A fair process for nomination and selection is crucial to preserving a public perception of the Justices of the Supreme Court as neutral jurists, rather than pawns of the political process.

If Democrats honestly believe this, then why should historical precedent not be followed?  And why in the world would they threaten to pack the court?  FDR tried to do that in the late 1930's to ram through his New Deal.  That was unsuccessful although in the long run he was able to nominate 9 justices and see them confirmed during his presidency.

Indeed, if Senate Republicans force Judge Barrett through in the waning weeks before a presidential election — after denying President Obama any opportunity for Senate consideration of his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland nearly a year before the 2016 election — the American people will unavoidably see the Supreme Court as just another forum for power politics and political players.

Not if they understand the true history of nominations and confirmations during an election year since our country's founding.  Having said that, we are already way past the point where the Supreme Court is being used as a political forum for political players, indeed since FDR and WWII.  Partisan politics have destroyed many of our institutions, the Supreme Court among them, and it continues to get worse.  But following precedent in this matter certainly seems far less destructive than intentionally packing the court.

There are nine judges sitting as the Supreme Court of Canada.  The USA has ten times the population, and is certainly a much more litigious nation than Canada, so IMO there is logic in expanding the SCOTUS.  Split the judiciary apart into two different politically balanced groups to hear different cases - two cases at a time to speed up justice being served.  After all, justice delayed is justice denied. 

Yahoo News/YouGov Poll: As Opposition To Trump's Pandemic Approach Grows, Most Voters Want Senate To Pass Stimulus Before Considering Amy Coney Barrett

As the Senate begins      confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett   , two-thirds of voters say Congress should focus instead on passing more COVID-19 relief for struggling workers and businesses, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 9 to 11, found that large majorities of the public think Congress has its priorities backward. Not only do more than three-quarters (77 percent) of registered voters want legislators to approve another major pandemic relief package; 66 percent want the Senate to vote on it    before    voting on Barrett’s nomination. A full third of Republicans (33 percent) agree.

yahoo