MCCONNELL: Senate will vote on Trump pick to fill seat. Page
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the Senate will vote on President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, even though it’s an election year.
McConnell, R-Ky., issued a statement Friday night, about an hour and a half after the Supreme Court announced the liberal justice’s death from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer.
When conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, also an election year, McConnell refused to act on former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the opening. The seat remained vacant until after Trump’s presidential victory.
Trump ended up nominating Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed to the court.
The 2020 election is 46 days away.
McConnell had earlier said he would move to confirm a Trump nominee if there were a vacancy this year.
Ginsburg’s death Friday gives President Donald Trump an opportunity to try to fill her seat — and potentially cement a rightward tilt of the Supreme Court for a generation.
McConnell would need to find 50 senators willing to back a pick put forward by Trump. With 53 Republicans, they can afford to lose three senators and still confirm a pick with Vice President Mike Pence casting a tie-breaking vote.
“We would fill it,” McConnell told Fox News in February. McConnell said then that the difference between 2016 was that the Senate and the White House were held by different parties.
On Friday night, Democrats quickly demanded that any move to replace Ginsburg be left for the next president.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York said in a tweet.
Trump released a new list of potential appointees earlier this month — revisiting a tactic he used in 2016 to galvanize support among conservatives and evangelicals. “Apart from matters of war and peace, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is the most important decision an American president can make,” Trump told reporters Sept. 9.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said at a debate last year that he was opposed to adding additional justices to the court if Democrats were to win the presidency.
“I would not get into court packing. We had three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all,” he said. But, if Republicans move to replace Ginsburg this year and Biden wins in November, he’d face strong pressure from the left to expand the court.