Summary
Two Democratic-appointed federal judges have unretired after the 2024 election, preventing Trump from appointing replacements.
The judges’ decisions were influenced by the Senate’s “blue slip” policy, which requires support from home-state senators for presidential nominees.
Republican leaders, including Mitch McConnell, have criticized the judges’ actions as partisan, while Democrats are rushing to confirm as many judges as possible before Trump takes office.
That was never a norm…
That was the party betting that enough SC seats up for grabs might get people to vote for Hillary, but they were wrong
Obama could seat someone on the legal rationale that while the Senate has the option to approve SC picks, there’s nothing that says they have to. So he was taking refusal of a confirmation as implicit confirmation and seating him.
Instead of, you know, just accepting that a SC seat was stolen.
There is zero chance the Supreme Court would have sided with this approach of bypassing the senate.
It’s not bypassing them.
Senate is entitled to a vote, but literally nothing says a vote needs to be held, just that they can.
They had a year, and didn’t.
There’s no such thing as a SC pocket veto.
Sometimes I forget that was almost a decade ago, but this was widely talked about back then. It’s not something I just thought of.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-obama-bypass-the-senate-on-garland-nomination
He also could have done a recess appointment
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/21/how-obama-could-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-and-why-itll-never-happen/
If you believe nothing could have been done so it was pointless to try…
Well. We saw how that’s worked out, didn’t we?
That about says it all. This is a fringe legal theory and not how it actually works. You’re spreading misinformation just to say “Dems bad”.