Occasionally we see how one federal judge or another has ruled in a particular case and we wonder to ourselves: How did this joker get a law degree? How did they pass the bar? How did they get elected/appointed to their position on the bench, when they are so clearly clueless when it comes to matters of constitutional law? Or, in more cases than not, willfully oblivious.
Now we see that these idiots get their law instruction from people like Ken Levy, a professor at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center. We don’t know much about Professor Levy apart from the op-ed he wrote for The Hill this weekend, but that alone is enough to tell us that he has a very limited grasp on the very subject he teaches at LSU. Either that, or like we said, he’s willfully oblivious. In these days of deceit and partisan hysteria, it’s hard to know one from the other.
In his piece, Levy argues that Democrats should sue Mitch McConnell to hold him to the argument he made when Antonin Scalia passed away – the argument that, only nine months short of the 2016 election, the American people deserved a say in the next Supreme Court nominee. McConnell used that suggestion to prevent Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, from getting a Senate confirmation hearing, banking on the possibility that Republicans just might win the election in November and walk away with the coup of the century. The risk: that Hillary Clinton would win and come up with a nominee even more liberal and extreme than Garland.
As we all know, McConnell won that bet. He won it bigly, you might say.
Democrats are obviously – and to some degree, understandably – distraught over the fact that Trump is now getting a second Supreme Court nomination, and in an election year, no less! Surely the “McConnell Rule” still applies, right? Well, come on. We all knew what McConnell was doing at the time. We all knew this was a bit of political theater. No one was seriously arguing, hmm, yes, this McConnell makes an excellent legal and legislative point. No. This was dirty politics all the way. To put it another way, it was the most brilliant gamble McConnell has ever made in his career. He singlehandedly saved the Supreme Court for a generation. Kudos.
But now Levy wants to pretend that McConnell’s political gambit has the force of law, and can thus be used against Republicans in court!
“This week, President Trump will announce his nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court,” Levy writes. “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to schedule the nominee’s confirmation hearings for this fall, before the midterm elections.
“If and when McConnell carries through on this promise, Senate Democrats should immediately file a federal lawsuit against him for violating the so-called McConnell Rule,” he continues. “Whether McConnell likes it or not, the McConnell Rule is law. When McConnell declared in 2016 that Supreme Court nominees are not allowed hearings in an election year, that decree carried legal force — the same legal force as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) reduction of the threshold to defeat filibusters for executive appointments and most judicial nominations from 60 to 51 senators.”
Ah, good try, friend-o, but no one’s buying it. McConnell’s argument, to the extent it was anything other than an excuse, only applied to a president in the last year of his legally-possible White House tenure. Even if it WERE legally-binding law, there’s no reason to assume it would extend to a midterm election year or even to a president’s first term.
We suppose there are liberal readers dumb enough to fall for this chicanery, though.
Sadly, we suppose there are law students at LSU right now who are impressionable enough to fall for it as well.
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