SEN. ROMNEY BACKS PUSH FOR VOTE ON COURT SEAT

President appears to secure majority before making pick

President Donald Trump on Tuesday appeared to have secured the votes needed to confirm his Supreme Court nominee days before naming the candidate, while Senate Republicans began working on plans to hold a final vote on the pick before the Nov. 3 election.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-utah, announced Tuesday that Trump should get to choose a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday, regardless of whether he wins in November. With that, Trump appears to have a majority for a vote this year by the Gop-led Senate, unless Republicans defect as the process goes forward.

Trump said he would name his nominee Saturday at the White House from among five female judges and lawyers the

White House describes as “textualists and originalists.”

“The Constitution gives the President the power to nominate and the Senate the authority to provide advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees,” Romney said in a statement. “Accordingly, I intend to follow the Constitution and precedent in considering the president’s nominee. If the nominee reaches the Senate floor, I intend to vote based upon their qualifications.”

Two of Romney’s Republican colleagues — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have said the Senate should wait on the vacancy until after the Nov. 3 presidential election. But Romney’s support for moving ahead almost certainly ensures that Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., can hold a vote on Trump’s choice.

Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has emerged as the favorite for the nomination, but some of the president’s allies continue to push for Judge Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit, whom Trump may meet with this week.

On Monday, Barrett met with Trump, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other aides, then met alone with the president. She was at the White House again on Tuesday.

Two advisers to the president said that Barrett remained the front-runner, and that Trump was telling others on Tuesday that he was likely to pick her. Trump has been receptive to advisers’ descriptions of her as a female version of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016.

The president has not yet met Lagoa, and some of his advisers are cautioning against making a choice until he interviews her.

Outside the White House, key Senate Republicans continued to lobby the president directly on his Supreme Court pick. Trump has fielded phone calls from GOP senators such as Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rick

Scott of Florida about their respective favored candidates.

Sasse pushed hard for Barrett in a conversation with Trump this week. Scott said he spoke with Trump Monday about Lagoa, a favorite in Florida legal circles but a much less known commodity in Washington and among Senate Republicans.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee huddled privately Tuesday morning to begin sketching out the procedural logistics for considering Trump’s eventual nominee.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., the committee chairman, said he will announce how the process will work once Trump makes his pick on Saturday.

“I’m confident we can have a hearing that would allow the nominee to be submitted before Election Day,” Graham said. “Following the precedents of the Senate, I think we can do that.”

Graham is looking at scheduling a confirmation hearing for the week of Oct. 12 and a committee vote near the end of the following week, with a vote on the f loor before Halloween, according to two people familiar the emerging plan.

Democrats are largely powerless to stop a Republican majority from confirming whomever Trump picks, and some had held out hope that Romney would break ranks.

Romney is the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on one of the impeachment charges in the Senate trial this year, and he has criticized the president on other issues. Trump frequently insults Romney as a poor candidate who should have defeated President Barack Obama in 2012 and dismisses him as a “Republican in name only.”

Romney was elected to the Senate in 2018, two years after Republicans blocked consideration of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, for eight months. Republicans then insisted that the seat should not be filled until after the presidential election so that voters would have a say in the court’s direction. Now, with a Republican in the White House, they insist that the president is dutybound to fill the vacancy immediately. “I came down on the side of the Constitution and precedent as I’ve studied it and made the decision on that basis,” Romney told reporters.

Furious Senate Democrats sought to stir up public outrage.

“If Leader Mcconnell presses forward, the Republican majority will have stolen two Supreme Court seats four years apart, using completely contradictory rationales,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

But Democratic leaders also acknowledged their limitations.

“I’ve been around here a few years,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Schumer’s deputy. “You can slow things down, but you can’t stop them. And there comes a point when we would use whatever tools we have available. But ultimately, there will be a vote.”

While Republicans and Democrats in Washington made maneuvers concerning the eventual Supreme Court nominee, the Trump and Biden campaigns focused Tuesday on states that the president narrowly won four years ago.

Trump headed to Pennsylvania, while Biden dispatched his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-calif., to Michigan.

Trump, who calls Harris a “loser” for her early exit from the Democratic presidential primary, predicted Tuesday that the coming Supreme Court confirmation process would “show how incompetent she is.”

Harris is a member of the Judiciary Committee that will hold the hearings. In past confirmation proceedings and other hearings, Harris has proved to be an aggressive questioner.

As Republicans prepared to move forward with the nomination, mourners in Washington and across the country were preparing to honor Ginsburg, a pioneering women’s rights advocate and longtime member of the court, in a private ceremony at the Supreme Court and a public viewing outside the court building today and Thursday.