Mississippi elected its first female US Senator yesterday. Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith beat Democrat challenger Mike Espy in a runoff election Tuesday. The win gives the GOP 53 Senate seats. More than enough to ignore the McCain-Esque Flake-like “warbling” or Moderate Senators Collins and Murkowski.
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In the past year, with Republicans down to 51 seats, McConnell has only been able to afford one defection on confirmations. That in effect has left fence-sitting Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Jeff Flake with out-sized influence over the nomination process as any two of them had the power to sink a nomination.
Going into 2019, Flake will be out of the Senate, and McConnell will be able to afford to lose both Collins and Murkowski and still have a vote to spare given Vice President Mike Pence can cast the tie-breaking vote.
That’s assuming everyone in the class of 2019 doesn’t sign up at the Ayotte School of voting like John McCain.
Judges, Judges, and More Judges
Philip Klein, writing at the Washington Times goes on to point out that, this cushion has other advantages. If you don’t have to pander to centrists, don’t. Appoint and nominate more constitutional judges.
Currently, there are 112 district court vacancies and 11 appellate vacancies on the federal bench. Going into this election, the Senate had confirmed 84 Trump judges.
If Trump fills all of the current vacancies, nearly one in four federal judges will have been appointed by Trump. This does not take into account any additional vacancies that could come up over the next two years. This could have a transformative effect on the judicial branch, and will likely figure heavily in the 2020 election as Trump will tout judges as a leading example of how he delivered for conservatives.
After the 2016 Republican Primary, we were still concerned about Trump. But we knew what Hillary would do to the judiciary. It was critical that, no matter what else we thought (or didn’t know) we needed Trump in the oval office. And a pre-election list of likely nominees helped that cause.
Cindy Hyde-Smith helps that cause along. One that may be the only thing we see done over the next two years that doesn’t involve Democrats crapping all over themselves, the President, and the media spreading around for them.
One more nod to Hyde-Smith and Mississippi. Nice job beating the spread by a margin too wide for Democrats to find enough votes to fill.
Image Credit & H/T Legal Insurrection
