McConnell reverses course on court
WASHINGTON – Mitch McConnell, who blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick in 2016 during that year’s presidential campaign, said he would help to confirm President Donald Trump’s choice if there was an opening on the nation’s high court in the 2020 election cycle.
“We’d fill it,” said McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky.
Three years ago, McConnell led the successful effort to obstruct Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
McConnell said it was important for the Senate to “give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy” by waiting until the new president took office.
“The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration,” McConnell said. “The next president may also nominate someone very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice.”
After hearing of McConnell’s comments Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed McConnell on Twitter as a “hypocrite.”
“Anyone who believes he’d ever allow confirmation of a Dem President’s nominee for SCOTUS is fooling themselves,” Schumer tweeted.
McConnell suggested in October that he was open to filling a Supreme Court vacancy in 2020, when Trump is up for reelection. The difference from 2016, when a Republican-controlled Senate blocked a Democratic president’s nominee? Trump and the Senate, which confirms judges, are the same party, McConnell said last fall.
But McConnell never made that argument in 2016, when he wouldn’t let the Senate even hold hearings on Garland. The only precedent the majority leader cited at the time was the “Biden rule.”
In June 1992, then-Senate Judiciary Chair Joe Biden, D-Del., said if a vacancy were to occur on the Supreme Court within the next several months, President George H.W. Bush should wait until after the Nov. 3 election to nominate someone due to the rancorous political environment at the time.
In 2016, McConnell used Biden’s argument, which was never formally adopted, to justify blocking Garland, even after the election when Obama had two months left in office.
Now, McConnell is also making the argument that it’s been tradition since 1880 that a Senate of one party does not fill a Supreme Court vacancy with the nominee from the president of another if the opening is “created in the presidential year.”
But in February 1988, the last year of Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 97-0 to confirm Anthony Kennedy to the high court. Kennedy’s nomination had been announced in 1987.
There are no vacancies on the ninemember court. But its two oldest members – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, and Stephen Breyer, 80 – are two of the four liberal members of the court. If one steps down or can no longer serve, Trump would have a chance to solidify the conservative majority for decades to come.