Honor her last wish, Senator Rubio
U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell would only wear the description “hypocrite” like a badge of honor. Anyway, it’s more civil to not call names.
However Senate President McConnell’s resolute vow to hold a vote — even before the Nov. 3 election — on any nominee President Trump chooses to replace the almost irreplaceable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, is a complete 180 from his obstinate pledge in 2016 to not hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.
That was a presidential election year, too. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died about nine months out from the election. Obama put forth the supremely qualified Garland — who never got a Senate hearing because, as McConnell said at the time, “The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.”
What a difference four years make. McConnell now appears willing to ram through a Trump nominee less than two months from the presidential election, even with a Senate recess coming up so incumbents can campaign. It will be a travesty, leaving little time to vet that candidate, but just enough time to inflict another brutal and divisive process on a bitterly divided nation, all in the name furthering possibly regressive policies that will roll back strides made in civil rights, gender equality and equal justice laws. These are what Bader Ginsburg stood for.
The president has a constitutional right to make a nomination. The Senate, however, doesn’t have to act on it, as the shameful Garland episode shows. And while Obama certainly had legacy in mind in choosing Garland, he was a lame-duck leader.
This can’t be said of Trump, who has turned everything from a potential coronavirus vaccine to social-justice marches into campaign props. A rush-rush Supreme Court nomination won’t be any different.
There’s not a lot that Senate Democrats can do to block the confirmation process from going forward. However, four brave, fed-up and fair-minded Republican senators can step up and say No. Will Florida’s U.S. senators be among them?
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, has been consistent, saying she will not vote on a Supreme Court nominee before the presidential elections. Maine’s Sen. Susan
Collins, in a bruising fight to keep her seat, tweeted Saturday that, “The decision of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on Nov. 3.”
Of course, that’s not an airtight commitment not to vote on a nominee.
Florida’s junior Sen. Rick Scott will not be among them. “It would be irresponsible to allow an extended vacancy on the Supreme Court,” Scott said in a statement after Ginsburg’s death was announced. “I believe that President Trump’s nominee should get a vote in the U.S. Senate.”
As of this writing late Saturday afternoon, Marco Rubio, Florida’s senior senator, has not made a public statement on the issue. But here’s what he said in 2016: “I don’t think we should be moving forward with a nominee in the last year of this president’s term,” Rubio said. “I would say that even if it was a Republican president.”
Conveniently, there’s a Republican president in office, and this might — might — be his last term. Rubio has a chance here to hew to the principle he expressed four years ago and honor the towering Ginsburg’s last request to not be replaced until ‘a new president is installed.”