Saturday, March 19, 2016

Why the GOP’s Merrick Garland strategy could be a disaster for Republicans - Salon.com

 Why the GOP’s Merrick Garland strategy could be a disaster for Republicans - Salon.com

by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern Law School)

The election strategy by which McConnell hopes to keep Republican control of the Senate — and his own office as majority leader — depends on preventing voters from associating their Republican senator or Senate candidate with Trump. The Democrats in turn will try to superglue any Republican to Trump. But the Democrats have a problem of their own: Most Republican officeholders aren’t affiliated with Trump and aren’t doing anything to help him. In order for superglue to work, you need a large contact surface.

The united front against Garland could change that. You can imagine one Democratic line of attack: They would declare that the Republican candidate wants to trust Trump to fill a Supreme Court vacancy – and that voters have to decide whether they love Trump as much as their Republican Senator or Senate candidate evidently does.

The attacks would be effective because they would obviously be accurate.
Trump has cited, as precedent for his proposed mass exclusion of Muslims, World War II Japanese-American internment camps, one of the nastiest human rights violations in America’s history. President Trump might be badly inconvenienced by a Supreme Court that took its job seriously. Civil liberties are a bother. Does your Republican Senator agree that it’s okay to put American citizens in concentration camps on the basis of their ancestry? If he doesn’t think that, why is he so keen to give a Supreme Court appointment to a man who does?

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