Supreme Court BS Logic

[MaynardGeeKrebs]

I want to provide a few facts regarding the GOP's latest talking point about there being some sort of precedence for not filling Supreme Court vacancies during an election year.

The statement that "We have 80 years of precedence of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year" (Ted Cruz) is incorrect. Anthony Kennedy was confirmed on February 3, 1988 (an election year) as a replacement for Lewis Powell who retired. According to my calculations this was 18 years ago.

But to fair (why should we?), Anthony Kennedy was nominated Saint Ronnie on November 30, 1987 (nearly a full year before the election!!!).

If we leaving Anthony Kennedy out of the discussion, we see that since 1864 there have been 12 Supreme Court vacancies to fill during an election year. Of these, 10 were approved by Congress. In 1968, two nominations made by Lyndon Johnson were not confirmed (one was withdrawn and congress took no action on the other). These vacancies were then filled by Nixon in 1969.


Ignoring Anthony Kennedy, I want to say why this is such a BS talking point. How in the hell can you argue that there's an 80 year precedence of not doing XYZ when in 80 years there was no opportunity to do XYZ.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States

[sharp_stick]

1. They picked 80 years

simply because it's been 80+ years since a Judge was confirmed during a President's final year, except Kennedy who was a replacement for Bork.

The other times, it just never came up. Not once that I can tell did a President or a Senate say that we can't nominate SC justices during the last year.