A politician's trifecta - A claim which is legally untrue, factually untrue, and statistically untrue.

This, I would not have expected to see.  Wolf Blitzer of CNN forcing a Democratic Senator to acknowledge that his argument (the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is illegitimate) is incorrect.  

After getting called out, Blumenthal admits confirming Judge Barrett doesn’t violate the Constitution.

BLUMENTHAL: It is illegitimate.

CNN: Where does it say that what Republicans are doing is illegitimate in the Constitution?

BLUMENTHAL: It may not violate the Constitution. pic.twitter.com/DwWIOJplLH

— Senate Republican Communications Center (@SRCC) September 27, 2020

Blitzer is correct and Blumenthal simply wrong - There is nothing unusual, illegitimate, or illegal about the current approval process.  Everything is constitutionally in order.  Just as it was with the Merrick Garland nomination.  Both nominations followed the same rules.  In the Garland instance, there were insufficient votes to overcome the Senate majority delaying the nomination.  In the Barrett nomination, under the same rules as before, it appears that the Senate majority will be in favor of an appointment.

Blumenthal has been a state Attorney General, a Congressman, a Senator since 2010, a Yale Law School graduate.  He knows that there is nothing illegitimate about the current procedure and yet he is advancing the lie until Blitzer forces him to acknowledge that there is nothing illegal going on.

At which point Blumenthal falls back on the weaselly, but factually also incorrect, claim that the current nomination violates norms, traditions and unwritten rules.  But it does not violate current norms because the current nomination policies and law have only been in place since 2013, brought into existence when Democrats controlled the Senate and only applied to three nominations since then.  Hard to have norms, traditions and unwritten rules around a process which has only occurred three times in seven years.

In 2013 Senate Majority Leader Reid (D) retired the longstanding supermajority rule (60 Senate votes) to bring closure to a filibuster, thus establishing a new normal of simple majority (51 Senate votes) to bring closure to debate and to proceed to a vote.  Reid established the new normal of simple majority voting on Executive branch nominations and federal judicial appointments, carving out Supreme Court Justice votes as an exception to retain the super majority rule.   In 2017, the Republican Senate under McConnell extended Reid's simple majority rule to Supreme Court Justice votes.  Since 2013 there have been only three nominations to the Supreme Court, all three of them following the majority voting pioneered by Reid.  

In 2013, Reid was opportunistically making it faster, easier, and less embarrassing to make Executive appointments and clear a backlog of judicial appointments.  It was pure political brass knuckles opportunism.  Constitutional lawyers from both sides of the political aisle counseled against it.  Even Democratic political operatives advised against it, knowing that once majority voting became established in the Senate, all appointments and legislation would come down to vote counting rather than the much more onerous and difficult challenge of negotiation and compromise.

It was bad governance and bad policy but it was deliberately chosen by Reid for the sake of political opportunity.

And now what was foreseen has come to pass.  A simple majority Senate vote in accordance with Constitutional law is all that is required and that is what is being done.  It is constitutionally legitimate.

Is it politically wise?  Who knows?  Reid's brass knuckles opportunism did not work out all that well for him.  Reid's action on the filibuster energized Republicans who took the Senate at the next election and have held it since.  Will Trump's late election cycle nomination of Barrett energize Democrats or Republicans more?  I have no idea.  After November we will settle on an opinion as to whether Barrett's nomination was a material contributor to the election outcome or not, but I don't think anybody has a strong case to be made right now one way or the other.  Every scenario is plausible and few of them compelling.

Both Reid, and then later McConnell were guilty of political opportunism.  What this really tells me is that the Senate really ought to reinstate the old filibuster rule, forcing them back into seeking common ground rather than these winner-take-all battles.

But that is not an offer on the table from our Mandarin Class.  Unfortunately.