PD Editorial: Honor Ginsburg by leaving politics until the election

It would befit Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stature and achievements to devote a week, at least, to mourning her passing and celebrating her remarkable career.

Ginsburg was a brilliant legal scholar, a trailblazing civil rights litigator, the author of memorable Supreme Court decisions and perhaps even more memorable dissents.

She also was, as so many others have written, a cultural icon and a feminist icon.

Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be remembered as an American icon.

Politics inevitably shadows the death of a Supreme Court justice. But in these hyper-partisan times, with the presidential election just 42 days away, the rituals of death and remembrance got pushed aside in favor of cold-hearted opportunism.

President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican power brokers blithely disavowed principles they loudly proclaimed four years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia died nine months before the presidential election.

Trump says he will nominate a successor as early as Friday and called on the Senate to hold a confirmation vote before the Nov. 3 election.

McConnell pledged to schedule that vote.

Here’s what Trump said about the subject in 2016, before President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia: “I think the next president should make the pick.”

McConnell refused to hold a confirmation hearing, much less a vote, arguing that a Supreme Court vacancy shouldn’t be filled in an election year.

“Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process, we believe that the American people should seize the opportunity to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate the next person for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court,” McConnell wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, coauthored with Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

During the 2018 midterm election, there was this from South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is now chairman of the Judiciary Committee: “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term in the primary process is started, we will wait to the next election.”

Graham, like Trump, McConnell and too many other GOP leaders, changed his mind.

No one should be surprised by rank hypocrisy in politics. But no one should hesitate to call it out, either.

For the record, we called on McConnell and the Senate to consider Garland’s nomination.

“Obama, like all presidents, was elected for four years, not three,” we wrote in 2016. “And there is no precedent for refusing to consider a Supreme Court nominee in an election year. Justice Anthony Kennedy was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in November 1987 and confirmed three months later by a Democratic-controlled Senate. He is one of numerous examples of election-year confirmations.”

Had the Senate taken up the Garland nomination — even if he had been rejected — we would have a hard time saying that the Senate shouldn’t consider Trump’s nominee. To do so would be going back on our principles.

McConnell and Trump propose to ignore their own precedent and abandon their stated principles.

Two Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — have called on their colleagues to wait as they did four years ago. It’s wise advice. Pressing ahead now would further divide the nation and add to the dysfunction of its institutions, including the Senate and the Supreme Court.

For the good of the nation, and to demonstrate their own integrity, the Senate should wait.

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