Republicans secure support to act on Supreme Court vacancy

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans have enough votes to consider and likely confirm President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee after Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said on Tuesday the president has the right to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg even as the presidential election is underway in some states.

Romney was one of the last Republican holdouts to announce whether he would consider voting for a Trump nominee, despite Senate Republicans’ refusal nine months before the 2016 election to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland after the death of Antonin Scalia.

Trump said he would announce his selection

– he said it would be a woman – on Saturday.

Republicans said they would decide whether to vote “yes” based on her qualifications. But with Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell holding 51 votes from Republicans eager to put another conservative on the high court, regardless of the election, confirmation is viewed as most likely barring a disqualifying surprise.

Only two Republicans – Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan

Collins of Maine – have said they will not consider supporting a nominee before Election Day, Nov. 3. Two more Republicans would have had to defect for Democrats to have a realistic chance of blocking Trump’s nominee.

Republican leaders have not yet announced if the vote would be held before or after the election and suggested that decision would be made once a confirmation hearing is held.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday on Fox News that he expected a preelection vote. “We’ve got the votes to confirm the judge, the justice, on the floor of the Senate before the election,” the South Carolina Republican said, “and that’s what’s coming.”

On Tuesday, he said he expected to hold a confirmation hearing. Earlier, Trump had retweeted a report that conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh called for the Senate to skip a hearing to hasten a vote.

A hearing would all but certainly command wall-to-wall television coverage in the weeks before November. Sen. Kamala Harris of the California, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her prosecutorial questioning of witnesses in prior hearings, including that of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, made her a favorite of progressives.

Rank-and-file Republicans are conflicted on the timing of the vote, according to Sen.

John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican. A preelection vote has advantages for Republicans: Senate leaders typically want to hold a vote as quickly as possible once it is clear that they have enough support.

And few issues excite their party’s voters as much as filling court seats with conservatives. This year, however, in an unusual twist, polls have shown that more Democrats than Republicans view the court’s makeup as important to their vote.

Democrats on Tuesday confronted the fact that there is little they can do to block the nomination.

“I’ve been around here a few years. You can slow things down but you can’t stop them,” said

Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “There comes a point – we use whatever tools we have available, but ultimately there will be a vote.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., has warned that “nothing” would be off the table in 2021 if Republicans move ahead and Democrats win a majority in November; party activists are calling for expanding the court if Joe Biden is elected. He added that Mcconnell would “destroy” the Senate if the GOP moved ahead.

“Leader Mcconnell has defiled the Senate like no one in this generation,” Schumer said. “Leader Mcconnell may very well destroy it. If Leader Mcconnell presses forward, the Republican majority will have stolen two Supreme Court seats four years apart, using completely contradictory rash analyses,” he added – a reference to Republicans blocking Garland’s nomination throughout a presidential election year.

In a sign of the deeply partisan nature of the debate, Republicans prevented Democrats from passing a nonbinding Senate resolution to honor Ginsburg.