The Judicial Crisis Network announced Monday that it will spend $2.2 million on an ad campaign in support of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) attempts to ram her confirmation through the Senate.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday, stoking Democratic panic and leaving an open seat less than two months before Election Day.
According to a release, the ads will run in Colorado, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Utah and Washington D.C. Unsurprisingly, those states cover many vulnerable Republicans who are in neck-and-neck races and who may have the most to lose politically from joining in the confirmation effort — think Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Thom Tillis (R-NC). They also include Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) who some Democrats are holding out hope will block the confirmation process altogether.
The Judicial Crisis Network spent millions on ad buys supporting the nominations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch as well.
Trump said that he will unveil his nominee late this week, though White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said it could be announced as early as Tuesday.
Trump has announced that he will pick a woman to be his nominee, and much early buzz is swirling around Amy Coney Barrett, a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge from Indiana.
Based on the record-breaking influx of donations to Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, Democrats are responding strongly to Ginsburg’s death, which left McConnell free to enable a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court, which could potentially endure for decades. Democrats are trapped in the Senate minority, leaving them limited tools to stop Republicans from sprinting through the confirmation before a potential President Joe Biden could hypothetically take over.
McConnell wasted little time in shrugging off accusations of hypocrisy and showing that he has no qualms about breaking his own excuse of proximity to the election that he used to thinly cover the power play of blocking President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, from the bench in 2016.
“Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary,” McConnell said in a statement. “Once again, we will keep our promise.”
Some are suggesting that Democrats’ only remedy would be to add seats to the Supreme Court in the case of a Biden win, a move taken in the 19th century and floated in the 1930s that would help balance out the conservative power. Democratic leadership is considering the tactic.
“We basically have kept options open,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told CNN. “We’d rather see this go through the regular process that Senator McConnell announced four years ago and that all of the Republicans stepped forward and said that we believe in this approach: We don’t fill vacancies on the Supreme Court in the last year of a president’s term.”
