I'm Michelle Goldberg.

I'm Ross Douthet, and this is the argument.

Today, what's the fate of the Supreme Court?

Will Justice Ginsburg's seat be filled before the election?

And amid all this dysfunction, how should the highest court in the land be reformed?

Because 2020 wasn't intense enough, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing last week has given President Trump the opportunity to further reshape the high court,

was less than 40 days until an election that he's currently on track to lose.

Amid pleas for restraint and accusations of hypocrisy, Senate Republicans are planning to fill the seat, while Democrats are threatening to respond by appointing extra justices, a practice historically known as court packing should they take the Senate.

Michelle, I can talk about what the Republicans are thinking here, but let's start with what is for now the opposition party in the Senate.

What's the Democratic mindset heading into this fight?

I think Democrats, even a lot of moderate kind of rule following norm respecting Democrats have been extraordinarily radicalized.

First, by what happened to Merrick Garland now by trying to shove through this new nomination on the brink of the election.

If you'll remember, Scalia died in the very beginning of Barack Obama's last year in office and Republican said that is too soon to appoint a new justice and that the voters should be able to decide and they basically refused to move on this very moderate and obviously well qualified judicial pick that was sort of designed to be conciliatory.

This wasn't a super progressive judge. It was a pretty establishment judge and they held it up all year and it was obviously just an assertion of raw power, but they dressed it up in a lot of self righteous language about there being some kind of quote unquote rule, the McConnell rule that we just don't do this.

We just don't vote on a judge this close to the election and they went out of their way to say we will respect this rule even in the last year of a Republican administration.

You have Lindsey Graham saying, please if this ever comes up, I invite you to use my words against me.

And so it's not that Democrats are shocked by Republican hypocrisy and I think Democrats are coming around to the view that you can't even criticize Republicans for hypocrisy because Republicans don't view a better way to do this.

So the hypocrisy as a vice, they just believe that power is there to be pushed to its absolute maximum.

But there's still something so insulting, so blatant about it.

The first piece I wrote when I became a New York Times columnist was about the tyranny and the kind of crisis of minority rule in this country.

The fact that we've had several elections where the popular vote loser has won the election, then we have this Senate that is controlled by an ever shrinking minority of the country.

So there's a sense in which this is being used to further solidify this kind of doom loop of minority rule.

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