Analysis: Why Mitch McConnell intends to confirm a new Supreme Court justice now, when he wouldn’t in 2016
can fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seatThere’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents a Supreme Court vacancy from being filled, regardless of how close to an election it opens up.Precedent in such a situation is different. Until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s 2016 pick eight months before the election, this hadn’t been done very often, says Russell Wheeler, an expert on Supreme Court history with the Brookings Institution.
McConnell can’t say he is flip-flopping on his 2016 position about election-year court vacancies because doing so benefits him politically now. So he has offered some logic that does little to disguise its political convenience: This time is different because the Senate and the presidency are held by the same party, which wasn’t the case when there was a vacancy in the last year of Obama’s presidency.
Republicans have a slim majority with 53 members. It’s hard to see any Democrats voting for this vacancy, so defections could cause McConnell trouble. And there are already signs of some.
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