Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Sunday night called on her fellow Democratic lawmakers to utilize every procedural weapon in their arsenal to keep Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from ramming through a Supreme Court judicial appointment by President Donald Trump in wake of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.
“It’s extraordinary important that we understand the stakes of this vacancy,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a press briefing with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “Our reproductive rights are on the line. Our labor rights are on the line. Our right to healthcare is on the line. Labor and union protections are on the line. Our climate is on the line.”
The New York Democrat pushed her colleagues to invoke “every procedural tool available to us” to “ensure that we buy ourselves the time necessary” to fend off McConnell.
“We must commit to allowing and to considering and to utilizing every single procedural tool available to us to buy that time,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We all need to be more courageous and we all must act in unprecedented ways to make sure that our rights are stabilized.”
“And to Mitch McConnell, we need to tell him that he is playing with fire,” she added.
The GOP Senate leader vowed to fill Ginsburg’s seat shortly after her passing on Friday in a whiplash-inducing reversal from his refusal to allow a confirmation hearing in 2016 for former President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. McConnell argued at the time that SCOTUS appointments ought to wait until after the elections during an election year.
Watch Ocasio-Cortez below:
AOC calls on fellow Dems to use "every procedural tool available to us" to keep McConnell from filling RBG's seat: “We all need to be more courageous and we all must act in unprecedented ways to make sure that our rights are stabilized." pic.twitter.com/QQ9zEFU1Kn
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) September 21, 2020
Will they listen?
That she cannot enumerate said tools speaks volumes.
What possible brakes does she envision being used? Mitch carefully deconstructed every reasonable means to defer in the Senate rules already.
AOC is right. This whole Amy Coney Barrett has been baked in the mix since Kavanaugh.
I would like to see the Democrats get some traction on this, but they seem confused about what to do with the outlandish abuses of power from the GOP side of the ailsle.
Unfortunately, the procedural tools available to Democrats now are pretty weak. If the Dems win the Senate and White House they can start action to expand the court, or make Puerto Rico a state, which means two more Senators likely to be Dems, or look at term limits for justices.
It’s hard to use procedure in the face of blatant corruption and hypocrisy. But that doesn’t mean Dems should try to be as foul as the Reps, if they do, then Democracy in the US is a dead letter.
Right off the top of my head, they can deny the R’s a quorum in committee. If there is day where less than 51 R’s show up, they can deny a full senate quorum. There is a rule that any sessions over 2 hours require unanimous consent from all the senators. There are literally a thousands of stupid procedural rules in the Senate. EXPLOIT THEM ALL! BRING THE ENTIRE BODY TO A STANDSTILL UNTIL THE INAUGURATION. They’re not going to pass anything useful anyway.