This should be good!
Opinion: Trump released another gimmicky Supreme Court ‘list’; Biden shouldn’t follow suit
Amid an uproar over interviews with Bob Woodward in which President Trump admitted to downplaying the coronavirus, on Wednesday the president sought (unsuccessfully) to shift public attention to something else: the future of the Supreme Court, which he said was threatened by a possible victory by Joe Biden.
Trump released yet another list of potential Supreme Court appointees — including prominent legal conservatives such as former Solicitor General Paul Clement along with three Republican U.S. senators: Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley. (Hawley promptly said that he wasn’t interested.)
Trump dared Biden to come up with his own list, so that Americans could “properly make a decision on how they will vote.â€
Biden shouldn’t take the bait. He already has committed to naming a black woman to the high court and said in June that he wouldn’t release the names of candidates in that category “until we go further down the line in vetting them” — but it wasn’t clear whether he would disclose such names before the election.
Biden is under no obligation to dangle a list of names before the voters and subject the lawyers and judges on the list to partisan attacks.
And suppose Biden did commit himself to naming justices from a list. He’d be hamstringing himself if a vacancy occurred in his administration and a new candidate emerged — say, Barack Obama, who in the past has said that a seat on the court would be “a little bit too monastic for me.†(Biden has said that he would appoint Obama to the court “if he’d take it.â€)
This continues on for a while, and, really, Biden is under no obligation. More importantly, releasing a list would show just how extreme Biden and the Democratic Party have become. If Joe’s list isn’t extreme enough, he’ll be excoriated by the Dem base. If it is extreme enough, Biden will show how extreme he is.
Next up will be media folks telling that Biden is under no obligation to release medical records.
That said, the “no obligation” thing is interesting: Trump is under no obligation to release any tax records. The Constitution doesn’t require that. Yet, Democrats still want them.
