Rancorous and Unproductive

Both Democrats and the GOP are demagoguing the new vacancy in the Supreme Court, but it's the Dems whose sanctimonious hypocrisy is laughable. As I noted in the Update to my last post, the Dems have blocked the court nominations of many GOP presidents on many occasions, but have (with the complicity of the media) wrapped themselves in "a fight against extremist jurists" meme. In reality, they, like the GOP, were acting in their own political best interest.

In the past GOP presidents have certainly opposed Dem-majority congresses, but there has never been the overt rancor fostered by Barack Obama over the past 8 years. This president has publicly ridiculed and often demonized the GOP congress dozens of times, and his acolytes in the Democratic party have followed suit. Now, the democrats expect all of that to be forgotten. That isn't how it works.

Chris Stirewalt of FoxNews writes:

In the face of a Republican refusal to allow him to install a new Supreme Court justice in the final year of his term, President Obama has a few choices.

Option one: He could admit defeat and wait for the unlikely chance to make a recess appointment.

Option two: He could find a nominee moderate enough to win 60 votes in the Senate. This would require Obama working his own party as hard as he did Republicans to find a centrist choice that could overcome bipartisan opposition.

Option three: He could pick a nominee totally unacceptable to the Republican majority in the Senate and spend several months berating Republicans for their unpatriotic perfidy.

Which one do you think it will be?

It would be a fitting end for the Obama era to close with a rancorous, unproductive struggle fought in the opinion columns and television shows the president supposedly distains. And that seems almost certainly where we are headed.

The only meaningful legacy that Barack Obama has left is the" rancorous and unproductive" politics he has actively promoted. Time after time, he has treated those who oppose his ideology as unworthy of recognition.

What goes around, comes around. And now it appears that the GOP-lead congress will treat his Supreme Court nominee in the same way Obama treated it—as unworthy or recognition. The congress would be wrong to do this if Obama applied Option #2, but that, as Chris Stirewalt notes, is not in Barack Obama's nature.