My Two Cents

[RANT]
I don’t care if he did it or not, we can debate that all day. I personally believe Dr. Ford but that is not what I want to discussion this afternoon.

We used to have Supreme Court nominees that both sides of the aisle supported and they turned out to be some of the best Supreme Court justices.

Take a look at this chart…

Where Brett Kavanaugh sits on the ideological spectrum/Axios

See how the recent justices are way, way over to the extremes?

What I find disturbing is the fact that the last two judges are so far right, father than most Supreme Court judges in history away from the center and there is a reason why the shift right.

In order for them to be confirmed the Republicans had to change the rules for electing a Supreme Court justice.

A little history on Supreme Court votes.

The Constitution does not say how many votes are need to confirm a justice, but long ag the Senate laid down some rules for the for confirming a justices, and not just for a Supreme Court judge but for all judges, you needed 60 votes to confirm. But back in 2013 the Democrats changed the rules to only a majority, 51 votes.

But that has changed the court makeup drastically, from a non-partisan court system to a very political court system.

CBS News wrote of the change,

Enter the "nuclear option"
It wasn't just Supreme Court nominees who needed 60 votes – federal judges and cabinet secretaries needed them as well.

But this arrangement had always been profoundly irritating to the party in power, particularly given the political polarization of recent decades. Time and time again, the party in control of the Senate and White House saw their selections for powerful positions filibustered by their opponents in the minority.

Under President George W. Bush, however, Republicans began toying with a way to get around the filibuster: a simple change to the Senate rules, which required just 51 votes, which would allow judicial nominees to pass with a simple majority.

In 2003, the GOP controlled the White House and had the same 51-vote majority in the Senate they have today. But Democrats had begun filibustering a number of Bush's judicial nominees, which Republicans saw as an affront to their agenda.

So Senate Republicans began toying around with an idea they called "the Hulk," a secret plan to remove the 60-vote threshold via a rule change. But it was the former Republican leader, Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, who reportedly gave it the name that stuck:"the nuclear option."

Did they use the nuclear option?
No. Republicans increased their Senate majority in the 2004 elections and the nuclear option was largely taken off the table. However, in 2013, Democrats were in charge of the Senate and White House, and it was the minority Republicans who were filibustering their judicial picks en masse.

So the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Nevada's Harry Reid, decided to pull the trigger. The nuclear option was implemented for the first time, and the Senate rules were changed so nominees for cabinet posts and federal judgeships could be confirmed with just 51 votes. Republicans cried foul, despite threatening the nuclear option in the past, and Democrats who had been opposed to such a rule change quickly changed their tune. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said at the time, "You'll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think."

However, the rule only applied to lower court judges, it was in 2017 when the Nuclear Option was applied to the Supreme Court.

Once again, the parties flipped sides on whether the nuclear option was justified. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said he regretted that Reid had used the nuclear option in 2013, even though he had backed the move at the time. McConnell, an outspoken opponent of using the nuclear option when he was in the minority, now justified its use by citing what Reid did as precedent.

The Senate rules were changed for Supreme Court nominees, allowing them to be confirmed by a simple majority. The conservative Gorsuch was confirmed days later to the Senate in a 54-to-45 vote.

What this has done in politicized the court system and more importantly the Supreme Court.

Judges should be confirmed not by a simple majority but by 60 votes again.

Justice Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because of the very partisan nature of his appointment. With the simple 51 vote majority to confirm justices we do not get good judges we get political judges. When it required 60 votes we got judges who were more middle of the road.

Yes, we got judges like Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Sotomayor but we also had justices such as Kennedy and Roberts who are more centrists.

It is time to change the rules back to a super majority of 60 votes to confirm justices.
[/RANT]