The Republican blockade that kept Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court a decade ago may be about to haunt the GOP, according to Washington Post columnist Jason Willick.
In a Thursday column, Willick argues that Democrats' victory in securing the House and Senate majority has put the court’s 6-3 conservative majority on shakier ground. In 2020, Senate Republicans pushed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett with a 52–48 vote eight days after the presidential election. Willick warns that it “suddenly appears much more precarious.”
He notes that all of the conservative justices not appointed by President Donald Trump are in their 70s, with Clarence Thomas the oldest at 78. With the Democrats' Senate victory, and Alaska still undecided, he notes that even if a Republican wins the White House in 2028, they will still control the Senate.
In 2016, Senate Republicans stalled President Barack Obama’s nomination of Garland, holding the seat open until Trump could fill it. “It’s hard to imagine a Democratic Senate confirming a Republican president’s Supreme Court nominee,” after that, Willick writes.
By the time the senators elected this week face voters again in 2032, two conservative justices will be in their 80s. “Why the aging justices most sympathetic to Trump’s legal positions (Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.) decided to deny Trump an easy opportunity to replace them is known only to the justices themselves,” he writes.
He believes Democrats may become more emboldened to take on the court more aggressively if they come to see its conservative supermajority as “effectively a lame duck,” Willick warns.
The court is one of four constitutional tests he sees ahead. The others are an “avalanche” of Democratic subpoenas from committees taking on a quasi-prosecutorial role; new Democratic trifectas in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that they could get rid of the Electoral College; and a possible battle over mass preemptive pardons Trump may issue on his way out.
Willick acknowledges that Republicans will get a shot at winning back seats in red states like Texas and South Carolina in 2032, albeit with much older conservative justices. And he argues the hardball politics of the past 15 years grew out of razor-thin partisan divides that this election just shattered.
He hopes the coming showdowns will summon some statesmanship from either party, aimed at durable settlements rather than temporary advantage. With Democrats taking control of Congress in January, that test begins almost immediately.
