Just how enthused was Bernie Sanders to address this latest attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court by the Left? If the Vermont socialist had been any less enthused to discuss the Sonia Sotomayor Switcheroo, he might have had to rely on monosyllabic grunts and hand gestures.
Advertisement
Kristen Welker practically had to drag a response from Sanders on yesterday’s Meet the Press. This video doesn’t last long:
“No, I don’t,” Sanders said soberly when asked if he would support calls for Sotomayor to step down.
After a noticeably pregnant pause, host Kristen Welker asked if he had heard of talks of the justice stepping down.
“A little bit, yes. I don’t think it’s the sensible approach,” Sanders said.
The Vermont senator’s answers were noticeably brief and without further elaboration.
Heh. “Noticeably brief” is an understatement. As a broadcast host on occasion, I have sympathy for Welker, who clearly expected Sanders to expound at more length, and perhaps in support of the idea, given the Left’s hysteria over the Supreme Court. When a guest refuses to talk and leaves awkward silences like these, any host will get a look on his/her face similar to Welker’s.
Instead of treating this as a debatable political strategy, Sanders looks as though someone served him a plate of horse manure as an organic vegetable platter. Given that any such strategy would have to get all 50 current Senate Democrats on board, that should put a stake through the heart of this proposal. Sanders wasn’t even on my list of current Democrat skeptics, such as Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and Jon Ossoff, who has to run in Georgia two years from now.
Besides, another veto has emerged that makes the whole idea moot. Yesterday, the all-popular “sources close to” Sonia Sotomayor told the Wall Street Journal that she has no intention of retiring in this session — not for Joe Biden, and not for Kamala Harris:
Advertisement
Despite calls from some liberal activists for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down while Democrats can fill her seat before political power changes hands in January, she has no plans to retire from the Supreme Court, people close to the justice said.
“This is no time to lose her important voice on the court. She just turned 70 and takes better care of herself than anyone I know,” said one person close to the justice, suggesting that progressives turn their attention to other ways of safeguarding the Constitution after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
As I wrote last week, we may think that Sotomayor gets the issues and law wrong, but she’s not stupid. What would she do for the rest of her life if she retired now? She has no intention of getting bullied out of her lifetime sinecure a single day before she’s ready to leave. And at some level, one has to wonder whether Sotomayor and Elena Kagan might have gotten a more honest look at the Left … and the necessity of constitutional safeguards against the kind of mob rule they seek to employ. This might backfire in more ways than one.
