Thanks to the Democratic convention, which inducted Joe Biden as his party’s candidate for the November 3 presidential election, The world relaunched its campaign log. A daily update, with campaign facts, political advertisements, polls, maps and figures that allow you to follow and experience the most important electoral competition in the world.
The Republican Party has the 51 votes needed to confirm the judge Donald Trump is expected to appoint on Saturday, September 26 to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Utah Senator Mitt Romney said on Tuesday that he was in favor of the procedure taking its course. He was not elected in 2016 when Republicans deemed it impossible to nominate in an election year, the pretext found to prevent Democratic President Barack Obama from replacing a conservative judge with a progressive one.
This Republican majority, however small it may be, deprives Democrats of any option. In 2013, to bypass Republicans’ obstructionist maneuvers over federal judges, Senate Majority Democratic Leader Harry Reid removed the required qualified majority (the filibuster). His Republican successor, Mitch McConnell, extended the measure to Supreme Court justices, paving the way for close confirmations. The last confirmed judge, Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018, won the support of only 50 out of 100 senators, including only one Democrat. By way of comparison, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had obtained 97 votes in 1993.
This democratic impotence was compensated by an outbidding about the composition of the Court whose number of judges, appointed for life, is not specified by the Constitution but by a law, the Judiciary Act adopted in 1869. During the campaign of the primaries, Democratic candidates had already pleaded for an increase in the number of judges, possible provided they have a majority in both chambers. A precedent does not argue in favor of this option. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase the number of judges to 15, but he encountered not only opposition from judges, but especially reluctance from Congress, which was dominated by Democrats.
Joe Biden, who took office in 2008 after more than three decades in the Senate, is hostile to this form of retaliation in anticipation. Reacting to the prospect of a confirmation at the charge by the Republicans, with less than six weeks of the presidential election of November 3, he endeavored on the contrary to plead for a return to the standards which he had experienced when ‘he chaired the Legal Affairs Committee. ” We must defuse [la crise], not fuel the escalation “, He pleaded, without doubtless imagining to be heard.
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