To the Editor: 

Republican politicians across the nation are showing naked, shameless, in-your-face hypocrisy as they flip flop on their excuses for stonewalling President Obama’s nominee to fill an open Supreme Court seat left vacant in February 2016, long before Election Day. At the time, GOP Senators issued pious claims like Mitch McConnell’s “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”

The excuses they now use to justify their sudden need to ignore the Voice of the People are staggeringly weak. They claim that Democrats would fill the seat, an accusation that has been mocked as “hypothetical hypocrisy.” Republicans also claim it is business as usual for a Senate to leave a Supreme Court seat open if the presidency and the senate majority are held by different parties. The historical record says otherwise. Democratic President Johnson left open a seat in an election year and a Democratic Senate confirmed Justice Kennedy, nominated by a Republican president, in an election year. 

These claims also fly in the face of common sense, as illustrated by McConnell’s recent self-contradictory statement "We have an obligation under the Constitution should we choose to take advantage of it.” Sorry, Senator McConnell, but an obligation is not a choice, it’s the opposite of a choice. 

This gets to the heart of the towering hypocrisy Republicans are showing. They could have said when they blocked Obama’s nominee what they’re saying now. They could have said “we’re leaving a seat on the Supreme Court vacant for a year, hobbling its operation, because we see a potential partisan political advantage in doing so.” They didn’t say that because they knew how voters would have reacted to the notion that Constitutional duties are really choices that can be blown off when there is insufficient political advantage.  

Larry Best

Chair, Loudon County Democratic Party