I think the democrats knowingly and intentionally let merrick garland's nomination languish without attempting to push it through, making zero effort to bring it into the spotlight much less try to overcome the senate republican refusal to vote
If you think that this is just a product of the media, not political will, I have two words for you: "Fiscal Cliff". If democrats had wanted to get Garland confirmed, they had a whole toolbox of options for how to pressure the republicans and create a showdown.
So ask yourself, why did democrats not let out a peep about it? Why did they not organize sit-ins, or hold the budget hostage, or get 1 million women to march on washington?
Because as anyone could see, the democrats wanted to use the scotus nominee to dangle over registered democrats as a carrot in the election, and so did the republicans, and it was a win:win for both sides.



When the Fiscal Cliff crisis was ongoing, the term spent 5 months in the national attention and you can see that on google trends. Merrick Garland spent a week in the limelight and then vanished off the face of the earth

This post was edited by Goomshill on Feb 1 2017 05:38am

This.



That's a great point, I hadn't considered the possibility.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Feb 1 2017 05:15am

when i put his education record and achievements with some of his writing its a bit weird. still as long as he's an originalist he's a decent replacement. there's an argument against the GOP owning all 3 branches of govt but this is about as loose of a hold together as a party that i've personally ever seen or heard about. Also i perceive a left shift in the other two branches so perhaps this is a good future check.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Feb 1 2017 07:01am

sry, but your little theory just doesn't add up, dems DID let out more than a peep about it, stop trying to argue by alternative facts please. holding the budget hostage would have backfired massively on them and hurt america even more than a prolonged supreme court vacancy, not that it would have forced republicans to hold hearings in the first place. dems were outraged and they voiced that rather clearly and they DID apply pressure to get garland confirmed.

since you didn't adress it and just continue with your narrative that dems are just as guilty because they didn't do enough to force republicans to do the right thing, i just assume you DO think these kind of measures should be required to even vote on a reasonable candidate? you think it was right of republicans to outright block a vote for almost a year to steal a scotus seat?

well i guess with that kind of logic, it'd be only fair if dems do everything in their power to block any republican nominees - they certainly have many more reasons to do it.

and please, for the love of god, stop trying to make this ridiculous google trends argument (without providing actual numbers even), garland has been a topic throughout the whole last year and there are countless stories about this, many of them still available on the internet...

No, they didn't, and I already posted some pretty darn tootin strong evidence when you denied it.
Anyone who was not living under a rock for the past year can already tell you that the national story of Merrick Garland simply vanished without a peep, but if you're going to deny it, metrics like google trends provide a good picture for contrast of what happens to a story when it is expounded cycle after cycle in the news by politicians contriving a crisis, versus what happens when politicians go mum:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=merrick%20garland,fiscal%20cliff




It would easily have forced the republicans, because the democrats would be acting in the right, and republicans willing to let the government shut down to hold up an appointment that Obama is due would be negatively perceived
You realize that senate republicans never let the appointment come to a vote, or even filibustered it, but simply made no precedings at all?
Law experts pointed out, at the time, that Obama had the power to simply appoint Garland as if it were a recess appointment since the senate had chosen to waive its powers to advise and consent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-can-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-if-the-senate-does-nothing/2016/04/08/4a696700-fcf1-11e5-886f-a037dba38301_story.html
They had multiple recourses:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/18/judge-dashes-merrick-garlands-final-faint-hope-for-a-supreme-court-seat/
Anyone with standing (ie a sitting senator) could sue to compel the senate to move along. That case was dismissed for no standing, but nobody with standing chose to file similar suit, even though they could



No they weren't. What pressure? I didn't see any screws being put to the republicans. Both sides dropped the issue quietly and moved along.
There were legal maneuvers they could perform to bring pressure and there were government functions they could hold hostage. Nothing of the sort was done.
Its like you don't even remember the fiscal cliff.




Google trends provides an accurate polling of how popular a story is in national media. Being able to quote some anecdotal evidence of say an article written by a joe bumblefuck somewhere about garland that was read by his own family and nobody else would be meaningless. Google happens to have the readily available resource to look up when people bothered caring about Syria, or when lady gaga was in the spotlight, or if anyone even remembers who Chris Dorner was. As it happens, even chocolate rambo had a longer shelf life than garland

I unsubscribed from /politics a few days ago... it's ridiculous how biased it is.

/politics and /news are horribly skewed. most right wingers get downvoted into hell for anything even half smelling like a support for Trump. shit you can't even talk about how something isn't a big deal without getting downvoted into censorship. but it makes for some REALLY good reading if you're into the shit show, i don't even read most huffpost articles i scroll right to the comments and pull out the popcorn. reddit is no different, half of the people only read the titles and go right to commenting.

the sad part is the only other option is to go to an alt right sub to balance it, i wish there was a credible middle ground but that seems to be eroding faster than the middle class.

I'm sure he won a Marshall Scholarship by being a moron.

in law especially book smarts and personal views get conflated quick. he's clearly not an idiot in terms of intelligence, but that doesn't mean someone couldn't categorize his originalist views as stupid.

that's the weird thing about law, you can have wildly out of line ideas while still intellectually understanding the precedent, law, etc that others in the mainstream use to justify their stance. and law school is a memorization game more than anything where you're allowed to fluidly change you stances from class to class to conform to the task at hand. being a judge not so much, you get on a path and stick it out.

True, but I have never cared if someone thinks an originalist/textualist is stupid.