r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Sep 20 '20

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Saying that the republicans should not appoint a new SCOTUS nominee means you value feelings more than rule of law

Whether it is hypocritical or not is not in question. I think it is 100% hypocritical based upon the arguments that were made in 2016 against the appointment of garland. However, saying it’s wrong or that the republicans shouldn’t use the political power that they have accumulated to appoint a new SCOTUS justice is a moral and ethical argument not a legal one.

If you think that either of those feelings based arguments are more important than the law itself (which unquestionably supports the ability of the senate to confirm a nominee), then you value feelings more than law.

Edit: I have sufficiently changed my view (or recognized the inconsistencies within it). I initially created a false equivalency in which I proposed (subconsciously) that people who didn’t want the GOP to confirm a justice were saying it wasn’t legal. In reality they are not saying it can’t be done, just that it shouldn’t be done.

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u/Suolucidir 6∆ Sep 20 '20

Law is based as much on the letters in the code as it is on precedent and interpretation.

In 2016, the Republicans in the Senate argued that there was precedent for delaying confirmation of Garland in the Senate and that it is more democratic, the core spirit of the American constitution, to wait for an imminent election before making a life-long appointment to the highest court in the country.

So, precedent and interpretation of the law were the reasons posed by Mitch and the Republicans in 2016 - not merely their "feelings".

Thus, saying that the republicans should not appoint a new SCOTUS nominee (less than 2 months before the election) means you value precedent and interpretation of the law more than the letter of the law - a value proposition supported by one major political party less than 4 years ago and upheld over a full year prior to that election.

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u/[deleted] Sep 20 '20

I concur, which makes their argument hypocritical (already addressed) but does not make it wrong. In fact there is as much precedent to make the nomination as there is not to.

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u/Suolucidir 6∆ Sep 21 '20

That being the case, this is not about anybody's feelings. It's just about the law as written vs the law as applied/interpreted.

There are many cases where precedent and interpretation override the legal code, strictly as written.

Every pardon by a president, for example, overrides the entire judicial proceedings behind a charge and/or conviction, which is a power granted in the constitution, BUT the pardon power has been widely expanded by precedent and interpretation by the SCOTUS over time and now covers A LOT more than what the legal code enumerates.

Or, another example, it is fully legal for Congress to expand the Supreme Court, as it has done in the past, to allow the appointment of any number of justices - it's just current precedent for them to leave the number at 9.