Kamala Harris Can Break a Senate Tie on Biden’s Supreme Court Pick

It is always tempting to solve a political problem with a novel constitutional argument.

In September 2020, grasping at any straw he could to stop Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, Laurence Tribe argued that Mike Pence could not cast a tie-breaking vote if three of the Senate’s 53 Republicans voted no. Tribe cited a 2018 student-law-review note by Samuel Morse (not the inventor of the telegraph) and a 2018 blog post by attorney John Langford. (It should set off alarm bells that both of those sources date from the Trump presidency.)

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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It is always tempting to solve a political problem with a novel constitutional argument.

In September 2020, grasping at any straw he could to stop Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, Laurence Tribe argued that Mike Pence could not cast a tie-breaking vote if three of the Senate’s 53 Republicans voted no. Tribe cited a 2018 student-law-review note by Samuel Morse (not the inventor of the telegraph) and a 2018 blog post by attorney John Langford. (It should set off alarm bells that both of those sources date from the Trump presidency.)