Democrats are reportedly having serious discussions about mounting a pressure campaign to force ailing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to resign so Joe Biden can nominate a replacement before President-Elect Donald Trump is sworn in.
After losing their Senate majority to the GOP, Democrats are concerned that Republicans will be “revving up the old conveyor belt of conservative judicial nominees” as soon President-Elect Trump takes office, Politico reported.
For Democrats, this is a hair-on-fire moment. And though the discourse in the media is presently dominated by recriminations about how this all happened, another arguably more urgent conversation is blowing up largely outside of public view: whether to push for 70-year-old Supreme Court Justice SONIA SOTOMAYOR to step down while Dems still have the power to approve her replacement.
This isn’t simply some flight of fancy happening among progressive activists online. It’s a conversation members of the Senate are actively engaged in.
A Democrat senator told Politico that the topic of pushing Sotomayor off the Supreme Court “has come up repeatedly this week in talks with their colleagues.”
These “Beltway speculative conversations,” according to Politico, have inevitably hit roadblocks for two reasons:
(1) It’d be a risky play with the party already trying to figure out how to handle a crowded lame-duck session
(2) no senator seems to be offering to be the person to put his or her neck on their line publicly (or even privately) by pushing for Sotomayor to step aside.
When Democrats first floated the idea of jettisoning Sotomayor last year, they were accused of ableism and racism.
The names of possible replacements have been discussed, including the allegedly “moderate” D.C. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was reportedly on Joe Biden’s SCOTUS short list, and has already been vetted.
Another name floated on Friday was none other than Kamala Harris.
Hellbound and Down 