The Latest Outrageous Way The GOP Plans To Stick It To Hillary (and Democracy)

On Monday evening, CNN posted a secretly recorded audiotape of North Carolina Senator Richard Burr speaking at a private meeting this past weekend. In the tape, Burr, who’s in the midst of a tough reelection campaign, can be heard telling the crowd that he’d recently walked into a gun shop and spotted a rifle magazine with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the cover. “I was a little bit shocked at that—it didn’t have a bullseye on it,” Burr said to laughter.

Burr’s gun remark was the big news from the tape—“In private, Burr quips about gun owners shooting Clinton,” read the headline on the CNN story—and the Senator quickly apologized for it. But that's only the second-most troubling thing Burr said. The real shocker was what he said he’d do if Hillary Clinton became president: “I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.” And this time, Burr wasn’t joking. He was deadly serious.

Back in February, after the sudden death of Antonin Scalia, Senate Republicans quickly adopted the party line that they wouldn’t confirm his replacement on the Supreme Court until after the 2016 elections. “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, rationalizing the stalling by arguing that voters should help decide, with their vote in November, who sits on the court. It’s now November and the GOP has held remarkably firm on that position, refusing to give Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to the Court, a hearing.

Now it seems the Republicans might carry their obstructionism beyond the election—at least if that president is Clinton. Last week, a novel legal argument, presented by conservative intellectuals Ilya Shapiro and Michael Stokes Paulsen began to circulate, claiming that Republicans would be justified in refusing to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy in order to shrink the size of the Court. And Ted Cruz—who, before becoming a Texas Senator and a once-and-future presidential candidate, was one of the GOP’s leading legal lights—said there was “precedent” for keeping Scalia’s old seat vacant indefinitely.

But a Republican like Burr putting his imprimatur on this sort of obstructionism is a different matter entirely. For one thing, unlike Cruz, he’s hardly an ideologue. A former Wake Forest football player and successful appliance salesman before he was elected to Congress, Burr was recruited to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004 precisely because of his moderate image. With North Carolina becoming less rural and more suburban, the state’s Republicans believed Burr could appeal to voters in Charlotte and Raleigh in ways that, say, Jesse Helms or Lauch Faircloth never could. Indeed, some Republicans described Burr as the North Carolina GOP’s answer to John Edwards. (That, of course, was back when they thought that Edwards was someone the GOP needed to answer to rather than just someone to be laughed at).

What’s more, Burr doesn’t appear to have any designs on higher office. He might actually be the least ambitious person in Washington—the only Senator who looks in the mirror and doesn’t see a future president. (It helps that when Burr looks at himself in that mirror, he’s seldom wearing socks) While someone like, say, Cruz is clearly positioning himself for another White House run, Burr, at times, has hardly seemed interested in running for his current seat.

All of which is to say, the fact that Burr—who lacks the ideological and the careerist motivations to stake out such an extreme position—vows to deny a Clinton Court pick, suggests this is now the mainstream GOP position. So, assuming Hillary Clinton wins the White House and the Republicans keep their Senate majority (thanks to James Comey, now seems very possible) and the Scalia vacancy persists until she takes office, one of two things will occur. 
Either the GOP will maintain a successful embargo on the Supreme Court, thereby undermining yet another democratic norm; or they’ll cave, ultimately allowing Clinton to fill the Court’s vacancy, thereby breaking their promise and enraging Republican voters in the same way they enraged voters by failing to deliver on their promises to repeal Obamacare and prevent the raising of the debt ceiling—which, of course, is what led to Republican voters to nominate Trump. In other words, both outcomes guarantee dysfunction.

Joe Biden recently told me: “In the 2012 race they asked me, if I could have any one wish, what would it be? And I said, to have a Republican Party. It was considered a gaffe — it was no gaffe. I genuinely meant it. Think about it. Nobody can speak for the Republican Party. Nobody. So with whom do you negotiate?” It looks as if that’ll still be an open question after next Tuesday.

http://www.gq.com/story/republicans-refuse-supreme-court-justice-confirmation