Josh Marshall is hosting a characteristically thoughtful and multi-faceted intra-party debate/discussion on “The Critical Question Facing Democrats & The Court”. Click over to TPM and read the varied opinions of Marshall, Theda Skocpol and TPM reader “MS” for how Senate Democrats should respond when Trump nominates Justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor; then come back for a broader historical and strategic perspective.
(Pause.)
Welcome back.
This debate exists because Democrats today are in the rare—but not unprecedented—position of enjoying majority popular support but minority governmental power:
- They’ve won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections.
- They routinely win an overall majority of ballots cast for House seats.
- Democratic senators represent a substantial majority of the nation’s population (Republicans represent a substantial majority of the nation’s acreage);
- On a broad range of political issues—everything from taxation to immigration to health care to civil rights—Democrats have majority popular support; and,
- Their support is growing as a demographic wave of millennials and the following generation slowly and inexorably replaces baby boomers and their parents;
- And yet they hold no levers of power in the federal government.
Since this situation is both rare and runs counter to our national myths, Democrats are (understandably) scrambling to make sense of their situation and how to respond to it. Here’s where history can be of some help:
- This has happened before. It happened in the 1850s when the electoral college and the 3/5 rule kept slaveholders in power despite a growing anti-slavery majority (fueled in part by mass immigration from Ireland and Germany). And it happened in the 1920s when a rural, white, Protestant minority desperately clung to power in the face of mass migration from southern and eastern Europe, and the beginnings of the Great Migration by African-Americans out of the South.
- If history is any guide, there’s no way this ends without massive and disruptive change. The conflicts of the1850s resulted in the Civil War and Reconstruction. The 1920s ended with the Great Depression, followed by World War II.
- Again, if history is any guide, the changes wrought by the emerging majority when it takes power will be worth it. Or at least, they’ll be considered worth it by that new majority—e.g., the end of slavery, the New Deal, the defeat of fascism.
When it comes to the tactics of a SCOTUS nomination, Democrats ultimately have no power to control anything about the process. A Republican president will decide who to nominate and when. A Republican Senate will decide what hearings, debates and votes to hold and when. If Republicans unite behind a nominee, Democrats are powerless to stop that person from becoming a Supreme Court justice.
Democrats do have the power to decide on what terms and with which tactics they will engage the fight over this Supreme Court nomination; and by doing so, to make it as costly as possible for Republicans to seat a Trump nominee on the Court.
That’s what Pelosi did when W. Bush tried to end Social Security. She united her side, fought, and thereby made it clear that any weakening of Social Security would belong solely to the Republicans.
A Supreme Court confirmation battle differs from a legislative fight; and there’s every reason to think Trump will eventually fill Justice Kennedy’s seat. The strategic imperative for Democrats is to make that victory as costly as possible for Republicans.
Early in the Civil War, after the Battle of Shiloh and its unprecedented casualties, President Lincoln replied to those who called on him to fire Gen. Grant, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.“
Better than any general of his era, Grant understood the fundamental power dynamics of the Civil War. The Union had at its command more people and more resources. Therefore, its strategy ought to be to unite its forces, and take the fight to the secessionists, fighting on terrain as favorable as possible, but fighting regardless.
Personally, I think fighting this nominee on the grounds that no president being investigated for obstruction of justice and conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to defraud the US of free and fair elections is the way to go. But what I think doesn’t matter. What matters for Democrats is that they unite and fight; and then, like Grant, that they do it again and again and again.
It’s the only way a powerless majority ever takes power.
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com
