How is it “cynical” to point out that where a split senate/presidency exists in an election year, the senate has historically used its confirmation authority to postpone filling the vacancy?

And the response is to demand something that actually would be unprecedented: packing the senate? Which only Democrats have done before, under circumstances where it was obviously to coerce the Supreme Court into deciding cases differently. Acting like Democrats hold the moral high ground here is utterly absurd.

If the Democrats don't hold the moral high ground, why is McConnell lying about his rationale? He didn't say "The majority can do what ever it wants, and that's moral", he made up rationales that change to as the facts do.

The idea that a Supreme Court opening should never be filled when the President and Senate are opposing parties is utterly absurd.

It's true that the Constitution wasn't written like Ethereum to preclude all attempts to undermine it with bullshittery like refusing to even put matters up to a vote. That doesn't mean it's at all moral to ignore it.

Also, was "Packing the Senate" a typo? FDR threatened but did not pack the Court. "Packing the Senate" is a Republican tradition (not that the parties mean much consistently, going back centuries), which even a blatant partisan couldn't avoid admitting:

https://www.newsmax.com/michaeldorstewitz/democracy-republic...

And slaveholders (the spiritual inspiration of modern Republicans) had manipulated the Court to themselves since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Circuits_Act

Yes, segregationists were Democrats during the New Deal, but so what? The parent described slaveholders as "the spiritual inspiration of modern Republicans," and we both know what they meant: the "Southern Strategy" Republicans used to flip the South toward them by consciously appealing to racism.

The point is that the parent takes an extremely tenuous connection between Republicans and slaveholders, while denying the much more overt connection between Democrats and slaveholders and segregationists.

There is this notion that the parties "flipped" sometime in the mid 1960s that's simply false. Republicans were from the inception the party of religious wackadoodles and capitalists. Democrats, at least since right before the civil war, were the party opposed to big business, banks, etc. The segregationists weren't just Democrats. They were New Dealers. They were New Dealers because the south was agrarian and at odds with big business (over tariffs) and banks (over monetary policy and debt). When Wallace broke off in 1968 to run on a segregationist ticket, he touted his pro-labor background. And as a result of that coalition, the New Deal and related programs were inextricably tied up with segregation: excluding most Black people from social security, creating redlining through the FHA, etc. See: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/rothstein-segregation-color-o... ("Walker’s second point overlooks that the New Deal did not merely concede to private bigotry but pursued independent racial policies that did much to create a segregated landscape that persists today.")

The South didn't really flip until Clinton. (Reagan won it, but he won everything.) Carter decisively won a bunch of southern counties that were 95% white. And ultimately it did so not because of the "southern strategy" but because southern states industrialized, and Republican ideas of low regulation and low taxes were great for attracting jobs and industries from northern states.

Sophistry laid bare for all to see.

There are a number of highly concerning posts you've made attempting to normalize a flagrant attack on the rule of law across this thread, but this post in particular is extremely difficult to reconcile with the principle of charity.

What "charitable" reading is there of the statement that "slaveholders are the spiritual inspiration for modern Republicans?" I'm simply pointing out that slaveholders and segregationists are the actual ancestors of modern Democrats. Not just because they share a name, but for concrete economic connections that endure to this day. Southern agrarian interests were opposed to the high tariffs Republicans imposed to protect northern industry (because they were exporters of unfinished commodities), and centralized banking (because they debtors). White labor unions excluded Black workers, who were competition.

Sophistry is overlooking by handwaving about the "Southern Strategy."

No. Sophistry is ignoring 50 years of post-Nixon/Goldwater era Republican political strategy.

It's tremendously difficult to believe someone could live in the states and not have any idea this was going on.

Even former RNC chair Melhman was fairly straight to the point on the issue in 2005: "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization." Nothing has changed since then.

Any Democrat who accepts a lecture about the "moral high ground" on the subject of the Supreme Court is the Republicans' useful idiot.

The Roberts Court disenfranchised millions of Democratic voters by gutting the Civil Rights Act. The fight over the Supreme Court's composition is a fight over pure electoral power.

It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

So if norms don't matter (as you, McConnel, and Trump seem to argue), the Democrats ought to pack the court, no?

"the senate has historically" means that is literally the "norms"

There are lots of things to argue but that isn't one of them.

So would you be ok if Republicans won this election and then packed the Supreme Court?

No. I would not be happy about it. But I fully expect them to do it. There are no longer norms. Screw the country. It is every man for himself.

The republicans had the opportunity to do it, and haven’t...

Why would they need to pack the court? They already have a political majority, do they not? No need to break a norm when it confers no additional benefits (as the breaking of the previous norms did).

They didn’t have majority until recently, and according to Vox and many left leaning sites, they’ve voted quite liberally since.

Further, there’s this: https://thehill.com/regulation/454463-ginsburg-dismisses-cou...

The Republicans don't generally vote as a bloc on most things. And many of them hate the President as much as the Democrats do.

For the record I was refuting the person above me. I don’t think they’d pack the court.

I don't think either side would actually do it. It's a political talking point, but it's just a bridge too far.

I totally concur. Double the seats on the bench.