By now you’ve probably heard that many people are ripshit about President Biden doing Mitch McConnell’s bidding in possibly handing an anti-abortion judge a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.
I keep waiting for some big announcement out of the White House to confirm, deny, or justify such a thing.
President Joe Biden’s bad deal with Mitch McConnell hasn’t improved in the past week since the story broke. It just keeps getting worse. Initial reports, broken by the Courier-Journal, that Biden had agreed to appoint an anti-abortion Federalist Society member, Chad Meredith, to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Meredith had proven too tarnished by his association with former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin to stay on Donald Trump’s nominee list, but McConnell was sticking with him. That report suggested that the agreement was this appointment for McConnell’s promise to stop blocking other nominees.
Follow-up reporting from Slate makes it worse. The agreement between Biden and McConnell isn’t for McConnell’s help in getting all nominees through—it’s a trade for two U.S. attorneys Biden wants in Kentucky—two temporary appointments, lasting probably just for the duration of the Biden administration. In trade for putting a judge that has the potential to be another Clarence Thomas on a path to the Supreme Court.
Like I said, a very bad and even more embarrassing trade. HuffPost’s Travis Waldron and Jen Bendery report on a 2018 letter Meredith’s former boss, Stephen Pitt, a general counsel to Bevin sent to McConnell. The letter was supporting Meredith’s nomination to a federal judgeship in 2018. Meredith, Pitt wrote, “would be a strong and dependable conservative asset to the federal judiciary for decades.” Pitt promised Meredith would “adhere to the textualist and originalist viewpoint followed by the late Justice Scalia and by other justices, such as Justice Thomas and Justice [Neil] Gorsuch.”
So, if we are to believe the Slate story, this is basically happening because of stupid insider politics in the Democratic Party. Payback to someone.
Crazy. Just makes no sense, and I don’t see how it could ever make sense considering current circumstances.
