Mitch McConnell's ‘out and out lying’ about the court ‘radicalizes’ right-wing justices: Morning Joe panel
Panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" discussed how Mitch McConnell's machinations to pack the U.S. Supreme Court had "radicalized" the justices he got confirmed.
The three justices nominated by former president Donald Trump, after McConnell held up a nominee by Barack Obama and rushed one last pick in the days before the November 2020 election, signaled they would undo abortion rights in a Mississippi case, and the panelists agreed the political scheming had turned the court into a highly politicized body.
"Do we understand what we are about to do here?" said legal analyst Maya Wiley. "What we are about to do is tell people it's just political, the bench is just political."
"The Supreme Court always is mindful, they're usually mindful of the fact they do have this power and authority, but they're not elected, they're appointed," said co-host Joe Scarborough. "That's one of the reasons [chief justice John] Roberts is always an institutionalist and here is what justice [Sonia] Sotomayor had to be getting at. Here you have a court that has two justices that went through very difficult and politicized hearings. We saw, of course, what happened with Republicans just out-and-out lying about the rules for putting justices on the Supreme Court. They did what they could do legally, right, but that doesn't mean there's not a shadow that's cast on this court right now that makes overturning a 50-year precedent that only 27 percent of Americans want overturned. That is much more of a black eye for this institution."
MSNBC contributor Elise Jordan suggested that McConnell's politicized process had turned the justices themselves into political warriors.
"That's something I wonder about, whether the process, the confirmation process, almost radicalizes justices going into assuming the bench and puts them in a political camp because they are forced into that wing and so that something to watch as the evolution of the court," Jordan said.
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