Who’s a hypocrite? GOP, Dems debate their past comments
WASHINGTON >> The “H” word — hypocrisy — is suddenly in vogue at the Capitol as lawmakers debate how quickly to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed that President Donald Trump’s as-yet unnamed nominee will receive a vote on the Senate floor “this year,” but has been careful not to say exactly when that will happen.
Democrats accuse the Kentucky Republican of blatant hypocrisy after McConnell refused to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, eight months before the 2016 election.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor Monday to remind McConnell of his own words hours after the February 2016 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. “The American people,’’ McConnell said then, “should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice.’’ The vacancy created by Scalia’s death should not be filled until the election of a new president, he added.
“No amount of sophistry can change what McConnell said then, and it applies even more so now — so much closer we are to an election,’’ Schumer said Monday.
But McConnell said it is Democrats who are being hypocritical. What Republicans did in 2016 — blocking a nominee of the opposing party — was “precisely what Democrats had indicated they would do themselves’’ when they were in the majority, McConnell said in his own floor speech Monday. He and other Republicans cited a 1992 speech by then-Sen. Joe Biden — now the Democratic nominee for president — indicating that a vacancy occurring in an election year should not be filled.
Biden, Schumer and other Democrats flipflopped in 2016, in McConnell’s telling, because they urged the Senate to act on Obama’s nominee.
Eight times in the nation’s history vacancies have arisen during an election year when the White House and Senate were controlled by the same party.
Seven of those times the justice was confirmed. The sole exception was in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson tried to ele
vate Justice Abe Fortas to become chief justice. The nomination faced a filibuster due in part to ethics problems that later led Fortas to resign from the court.
“Apart from that one strange exception, no Senate has failed to confirm a nominee in the circumstances that face us now,’’ McConnell said.
“The American people reelected our majority in 2016 and strengthened it further in 2018 because we
pledged to work with President Trump on the most critical issues facing our country. The federal judiciary was right at the top of that list,’’ he said.
On that final point — the importance of the judiciary — Schumer agreed.
“That’s what this (fight) is all about,’’ he said. “All the rights enshrined in our Constitution that are supposed to be protected by the Supreme Court of the United States” are at stake.”