What do you do when your first 100 days are an unmitigated failure of such epic proportions that the media is congratulating you for learning how things work in baby steps?
You send Kellyanne out with some alternative facts.
And so Kellyanne Conway told Katie Couric “this is the first time since 1881 that a President has had a #SCOTUS justice confirmed in first 100 days.”
.@kellyannePolls tells me this is the first time since 1881 that a President has had a #SCOTUS justice confirmed in first 100 days.
— Katie Couric (@katiecouric) April 26, 2017
Of course Conway doesn’t mention that Republicans had to use the nuclear option to get this very extreme Justice confirmed for a seat that Republicans stole from President Obama, after violating all precedent by obstructing his very moderate, non-partisan pick for almost a year for no reason other than they wanted a Republican to fill that seat.
Sure, that’s not how this is supposed to work, and that’s part of what makes Kellyanne Conway’s claim silly. But even worse is Republicans ruined the Senate, their own words, by using the nuclear option to give Trump this “win”, by changing the procedural rules so that they could get Gorsuch confirmed with a simple majority of votes (51), rather than the normal supermajority (60) used for a Supreme Court nominee.
There’s a reason a Supreme Court nominee is supposed to get 60 votes. If they can’t, the President is supposed to nominate someone who can, not change the rules to get his new toy.
Getting Gorsuch confirmed in the first 100 days is actually Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) “accomplishment”, for if he hadn’t obstructed Merrick Garland for nearly 300 days, there wouldn’t have been an open seat and if he hadn’t changed the senate rules, Gorsuch wouldn’t be confirmed.
PolitiFact found this to be McConnell’s “achievement”:
Historians we checked with mostly agreed that Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch to fill a Supreme Court vacancy was a significant event, and one that could influence public policy long after Trump leaves the White House.
That said, some cautioned against making too much of Gorsuch’s confirmation, arguing that it followed the nearly year-long blockage of Obama nominee Merrick Garland by the Republican Senate. “It was really (Senate Majority Leader Mitch) McConnell’s achievement,” said Jeff Shesol, author of books on Roosevelt and Johnson and a former speechwriter for Clinton.
Trump didn’t get his SCOTUS pick because he made a good one that the people approved of, or because he had any political capital. Republicans jammed this SCOTUS pick down the throats of all Americans, and they did so in less time than the average pick takes to confirm because they did not allow the process to work as it’s supposed to.
Donald Trump does have a few accomplishments for his first 100 days. They were achieved through executive order, and many of them are not exactly what he planned. But they still count as efforts. The problem that Trump has is he doesn’t understand anything about the position he occupies and he has no one around who can explain it to him in a way that he understands.
Bullying your way into a win isn’t a win in politics, because if you don’t have the will of the people on your side, your change will not last. This is why Trump should have used the first 100 days to get legislation passed, because legislation is harder to reverse for the next president.
Kellyanne Conway tried to ride to Trump’s rescue with some pretty alternative facts today, but they don’t fly.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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