Tilting the playing field: How Republican "constitutional hardball" has reshaped politics
Stealing a Supreme Court seat is just one example: Republicans have long believed they must play dirty to win
PAUL ROSENBERG
03.18.2018•12:00 PM
Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat -- and that may be the most overlooked reason why Donald Trump is president today. That alluring possibility was clearly the main reason why so many Republicans stood by Trump (or at least held their tongues) even in the worst days of the 2016 campaign, after the "Access Hollywood" tape surfaced.
Of course the theft wasn't legally defined as such, nor was it unconstitutional. But never before have senators of one party refused even to consider a Supreme Court nominee, effectively robbing one president of his appointment power to give it to another. Some Republicans openly considered holding the seat open indefinitely, had Hillary Clinton been elected.
Welcome to the land of “constitutional hardball,” meaning things a judge might let you get away with under the Constitution, but that your mother never would.
Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet, who coined the term (here), delicately defined it as “political claims and practices ... that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.”
Tushnet and other legal scholars who have written about constitutional hardball typically view it as something everyone in American politics does — he has described examples of both Democrats and Republicans engaging in it. But political commentators such as David Waldman, Matt Yglesias, Jonathan Bernstein and myself have seen it as something Republicans do far more often and intensely than Democrats, in line with the well-documented phenomena of asymmetric polarization.
more
https://www.salon.com/2018/03/18/tilting-the-playing-field-how-republican-constitutional-hardball-has-reshaped-politics/
