CNN: How About SCOTUS As a Kamala Consolation Prize?

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Well ... at least the Senate hearings would be entertaining. Consider what this exchange would look like on national television for Democrats:

Q: Can you explain why you failed your first bar exam?

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KAMALA HARRIS: I was born in a middle-class household ...

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself!) continue to plumb the depths of despair and desperation in the wake of their resounding defeat on Tuesday. The effort to push Sonia Sotomayor off the Supreme Court has accelerated, according to Politico, a point to which we'll return in a moment. CNN contributor Bakari Sellers proposed appointing Harris to the open seat, and accelerating the process to ensure Harris got confirmed before the next session on January 3:

SELLERS: And so I hope that Joe Biden makes the next 10 weeks as consequential as he can. I don't care about drawing outside the lines or what Republicans may think about it. This is within your purview, you can actually do it, and you should do it.

And one more thing, John, is you have a helluva of a vice president right there who has a legal pedigree to sit on the Supreme Court and let Republicans go crazy and ape that I'm even mentioning that option.

SINGLETON: That's interesting.

BERMAN: Are you floating -- are you floating -- you know, 7:39 a.m. on the East Coast. Did Bakari Sellers just float Vice President Kamala Harris as a potential Supreme Court nominee?

SELLERS: Not only am I floating it, but I want to stir up everything. I want people's heads to explode this morning so we go into the weekend just knowing that the chaos has not ended just yet.

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This is so amusingly dumb that it's almost impossible to explore all of the threads of inanity it presents. I'll just quickly note that the "pwning the cons" argument here is *chef's kiss* perfect as an example of elite media disconnect. Harris just lost the popular vote to Trump, and Sellers thinks she's a great choice to humiliate Republicans ... and CNN's panel doesn't even bother to point that out. 

More substantively: Can anyone who saw Harris getting questioned about her policies and track record imagine what a Senate confirmation hearing would look like? Why would any Democrat put their credibility on the line -- let alone the party's credibility -- to support the trainwreck that would result? Put aside that she failed the bar exam on her first try, which isn't exactly a measure of legal excellence associated with this level of appointment. Harris didn't even practice law for long, and not much when she did; she grossly exaggerated the number of cases she personally prosecuted, the record of which would come out during a confirmation process. What makes anyone think she'd be able to consider legal-philosophy questions and precedents in depth and under pressure?

Next: Why would anyone assume Biden would choose Harris for an appointment to anything? Whether she participated in it or not, Harris became the beneficiary of the soft coup that Democrats pulled on Biden. And over the last couple of days, Harris' team has tried to blame Biden for her loss, which Biden's camp is angrily rebutting:

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What they're saying: One Democrat familiar with the White House's dynamics pointed a finger at Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, Biden's top political aides: "Mike and Steve will have a lot to answer for — having him run" for re-election at 80 years old.

  • One person involved with Harris' team told Axios: "The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite." ...

A former Biden staffer dismissed the Harris team's criticisms as making excuses for the vice president's failures: "How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?"

Now, it's true that Biden eventually forgave Harris for calling him a racist in June 2019 to make her his running mate. He may forgive her trying to shift blame for the election onto him. But I sincerely doubt that he's inclined to push out a reliably progressive justice like Sotomayor to roll the dice on an appointment that would blight his record for the rest of time, even if Senate Democrats could get it through before the end of this session. That would be almost impossible for a legitimate nominee, as I wrote yesterday, but trying to hand Harris a SCOTUS seat for a consolation prize after bombing out in an election would make that task as impossible as it is ridiculous. 

Nevertheless, Politico reports, some Senate Democrats are trying to push Sotomayor out anyway. The conversations don't involve Harris, but DC Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs. (Progressives were none too happy about Childs two years ago, although Lindsey Graham praised her.)  One unnamed Senate Democrat sounds pretty skeptical, and wonders about the risk of handing Trump an open SCOTUS seat to start off his presidency:

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If Sotomayor were to resign, “she can sort of resign conditionally on someone being appointed to replace her,” the Democratic senator told Playbook. “But she can't resign conditioned on a specific person. What happens if she resigns and the nominee to replace her isn’t confirmed and the next president fills the vacancy?” ...

“We would have to have assurances from any shaky senator that they would back a nominee in the lame duck, because what do you do if she announces she's going to step down and then [independent West Virginia Sen. JOE] MANCHIN doesn't support her and then [Republican Sens.] SUSAN COLLINS and LISA MURKOWSKI back off and say they're not going to support a new nominee?” one senior Democratic source told us. “Do you just rescind that letter?”

The logistics, the senator suggested to us, may be insurmountable.

Sotomayor couldn't rescind that letter without disqualifying herself as a politically biased jurist. Once Sotomayor resigns, alea iacta est. If Democrats can't get a nominee confirmed by January 3, the nomination will have to be resubmitted in the next session of Congress, when Republicans will have at least 53 seats and can easily spike it in committee. That's a recipe for a Donald Trump nomination to make the court 7-2 almost immediately on taking office. Sotomayor's smart enough to know that, too. Sotomayor will ignore the political pressure to resign and spend the next four years taking care of her health. 

Yesterday, I called this idea "too dumb to check." It now serves as evidence that there's no idea so dumb that desperate politicians won't entertain it. 

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Or desperate members of the Protection Racket Media, for that matter. This election cycle thoroughly exposed them as a coordinated propaganda campaign for the elitist progressive clique that is desperate to cling to power. Time after time, establishment media attempted to gaslight Americans and frighten us into stampeding toward Democrats -- and this time they failed. 

If we don't defend and support free speech and independent media platforms, the next time they will succeed. That is why so many of our readers have joined our team as VIP, VIP Gold, and now VIP Platinum members

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David Strom 1:00 PM | December 09, 2024
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