Monday morning on The View, co-hosts Joy Behar, Sara Haines, and Sunny Hostin each individually admitted that they cried when they heard the news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away.
“I did not cry when she died, but I cried when Antonin Scalia died,” Meghan McCain said when it was her turn to speak, going on to highlight the unique nature of the bond between the two ideologically opposed justices. “It’s really a relationship that I hope that all of Americans can look to about being politically on two separate sides and still coming together and having great love and respect for one another.”
And yet unlike her left-leaning co-hosts, McCain could not bring herself to criticize Republicans for their blatant “hypocrisy” when it comes to rushing through a replacement for Ginsburg after blocking President Barack Obama’s ability to name a successor for Scalia with almost a year left in his second term.
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“One of my biggest concerns is, if we have a contested election in 2020 and it’s split even, like there was in 2000, we have to have a full court ruling on it,” McCain said. “So I think the potential for constitutional chaos is absolutely the most imminent it has been in my modern lifetime.”
As for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she added, “I hear what you guys are saying about hypocrisy and I hear it and receive it, but he is someone who only cares about this. This is, like, his core issue. He does not want to run for president, he doesn’t want to seek higher office, and if everyone thinks he hasn’t been preparing for this exact scenario, I think they’re just a little naive. No disrespect to anyone who thought that.”
McCain went on to explain that like “a lot of Republicans,” she was “completely radicalized” by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. “There were accusations of him being part of a rape gang, and accusations that were completely baseless, and it has shown that Democrats will do anything and everything to smear any conservative,” she said.
Finally, she predicted that the fight over Ginsburg’s seat will transform the presidential race so much that “we’re not going to be talking about coronavirus in the same way that we were before, we’re not going to be talking about The Atlantic piece, we’re only going to be talking about these meat-and-potato issues that really, really galvanize both bases.”
After Haines introduced a montage of McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and others declaring that the voters of the 2016 election should have a say in Scalia’s replacement, she said, “I’m not surprised at the hypocrisy. I’m jaded a bit and cynical to D.C. and how it operates, but in the shadow of what’s been left behind after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, the irony of what type of human she was and what we’re seeing in our politicians is disheartening.
“But at the same time, you have people on the left that are screaming that they’re going to pack courts and create violence and you’re going to see chaos that we’ve never seen if Mitch McConnell does this!” McCain shot back, declining to name names. “Everyone is behaving badly across the board and the deep politicizing that happened after she passed is true.”
Then, when Haines attempted to highlight something from the record of Trump’s presumed frontrunner pick Amy Coney Barrett that “should scare all of us,” McCain wouldn’t let her get it out. “I would be careful slandering her, Sara, before she’s even been put in the court,” she said. “And this is what I’m talking about with the Kavanaugh stuff.”
As the two women started trying to get a word in over each other, moderator Whoopi Goldberg clapped her hands and shouted, “Everybody stop!” before throwing the commercial.
After the break, Goldberg gave Haines a chance to read this quote from Barrett that she found so disturbing for blurring the line between church and state: “A legal career is but a means to an end… and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”
In response, McCain said, “There seems to be a real bias against a woman who has seven children and is Catholic. And I just don’t want her to be Kavanaugh’d, because I don’t think it’s fair.”
