2016—Harry Reid, D-Fantasyland. In an op-ed in the Washington Post opposing the Senate Republican strategy to keep open through the November 2016 elections the Supreme Court vacancy resulting from Justice Scalia’s death, Democratic leader Reid claims that Senate Democrats “always guaranteed Supreme Court nominees a fair hearing and a floor vote.”
Yes, believe it or not, that’s the same Reid who, as Senate minority leader in 2006, voted to support an attempt to filibuster the nomination of Justice Alito (and thus prevent a floor vote). That filibuster attempt won the support of 25 Democratic senators (a majority of the caucus), including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Patrick Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin.
2023—Six years earlier, President Donald Trump earned intense criticism (including from yours truly) for disparaging a federal judge whose ruling he didn’t like as a “so-called judge.” But Senator Ron Wyden manages to do far worse than Trump.
In a prepared Senate floor speech, Wyden blatantly tries to intimidate federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in a pending lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder awarded Kacsmaryk the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence for his work as a federal prosecutor. But Wyden, parroting left-wing critics, lambastes Kacsmaryk as a “lifelong right-wing activist,” a “partisan ideologue,” an “anti-abortion zealot,” and “the most lawless judge in the country,” and he calls the case “a rigged game.”