Here Is Your Depressing Update On The State Of The SCOTUS Nomination Nightmare

today, we are all losers

[contextly_sidebar id="NOco7xfcWfm8BiuUCTof79S44bfLIvZs"]You probably spent your weekend getting all March Mad Sportsball and whining about how your bracket blew up, whatever the hell that means, and because of that you weren't keeping abreast of just how godawful stupid the SCOTUS nomination thing is going. It isn't bad enough that we've had to hear from BOTH Meghan McCain AND David Duke on Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the highest court in the land. We also had to have Orrin Hatch hurl himself into the news cycle again to make mouth noises about how maybe just maybe if we had President Hillary Clinton come 2017, the Senate might get around to doing its goddamn job and confirm Garland in the lame duck. Not, of course, to be nice to Obama, but because that would be a way to dick over Hills before she even took office.

Guess what? Even that part was a total fucking lie. Guess Mitch McConnell woke up on Sunday morning and remembered that it was time to make Orrin Hatch his bitch, so McConnell wandered onto your CNN television screen yesterday morning to explain how he will stand athwart the Senate yelling STOP or something like that.

In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" Sunday, the Kentucky Republican stuck by his stance that Obama's successor ought to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. [...] Asked if he's ruling out the possibility of a lame duck confirmation entirely, McConnell said: "Yes."

One of the reasons that McConnell has to save us from the terror of a judge with a completely banal centrist record? Because, of course, Merrick Garland is insufficiently bloodthirsty enough for your modern GOP, an entity that is apparently owned lock, stock, and barrel by the NRA. What are the high crimes of Garland? Did he personally drive to NRA members' houses and take away their guns? Has he been stockpiling bullets so you can't buy them and protect your family?

[T]he gun lobby group’s case against Garland is very thin. It consists of Garland’s single vote to rehear a [gun-related] case that one of his court’s most conservative members also voted to rehear, along with a decision to allow the FBI to continue to perform audits on the background check system after lawmakers sympathetic to the NRA tried and failed to shut those audits down.

BURN HIM. The nerve of a judge to not just rule wholesale in favor of anything the NRA desires!

Doesn't matter anyway, really, because when Donald Trump gets ushered into the presidency on a tide of stupid, he will have his own completely credible and serious way of choosing SCOTUS justices.

“So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to get between five and 10 judges that everybody respects, likes and totally admires,” he said, adding that he would “guarantee it personally, like we do in the world of business, which we don’t like to do too often, but I will guarantee it that those are going to be the first judges that I put up for nomination if I win.”

Great. We have a Senate that has abdicated its responsibilities and a major presidential candidate whose judicial philosophy sounds like the guy from Men's Wearhouse.

Heaven help us.

[ CNN / Think Progress / NYT ]