It sounds like Democrats are worried that a Supreme Court vacancy is about to appear because they are already threatening to retaliate if Republicans attempt to fill one this year:
NBC NEWS – Democrats are warning Republicans not to fill a possible Supreme Court vacancy this year after denying President Barack Obama the chance in 2016, saying it would embolden a push on the left to add seats to the court whenever they regain power.
“We knew basically they were lying in 2016, when they said, ‘Oh, we can’t do this because it’s an election year.’ We knew they didn’t want to do it because it was President Obama,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in an interview.
Kaine, the party’s last vice presidential nominee and a lawmaker with a reputation as an institutionalist, said confirming a nominee of President Donald Trump this year could compel Democrats to consider adding seats to the high court.
“If they show that they’re unwilling to respect precedent, rules and history, then they can’t feign surprise when others talk about using a statutory option that we have that’s fully constitutional in our availability,” he said. “I don’t want to do that. But if they act in such a way, they may push it to an inevitability. So they need to be careful about that.”
Ok first of all, McConnell’s actions in 2016 were not a precedent for 2020 because there was NO incumbent running in that race. Democrats like Tim Kaine can lie about it all they want, but McConnell’s decision to wait until after the election was entirely appropriate. Heck, it was widely believed that Hillary would win the 2016 election anyway, so McConnell’s decision at the time wasn’t really even a partisan decision. If Hillary had won, she would have nominated someone and they likely would have been approved.
Secondly, Kaine’s comments above are decidedly partisan. Threatening to remake the Supreme Court simply because Republicans fill a vacancy when they are in power is as juvenile a threat as they like to accuse Trump of making. If they don’t get their way, they are going to cry about it and then use their power to add more seats to the court so they can put more activist justices on the court in order to keep the court liberal and keep abortion legal.
Lastly, what do they know about RBG that they aren’t saying? Is she closer to leaving the court or even, God forbid, death’s door than has been previously reported? Or is someone else planning on stepping down from the court this year? For Senate Democrats to make a threat like this leads me to believe something is about to happen.
On a side note, if a vacancy does present itself Republicans would be fools not to nominate someone and fill the vacancy. A battle over a Supreme Court nomination, if like the one we saw in 2018, would emolden people behind Trump and could possibly guarantee his victory in November.