The Senate leader, who blocked former president Barack Obama’s nominee for much of 2016, is pressing ahead within weeks of the Nov. 3 election.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has made judicial confirmations a hallmark of his legacy, is now confronting an extremely fraught Supreme Court fight that will challenge his pledge to leave no vacancy behind amid charges of hypocrisy and as his party’s control of the Senate hangs in the balance.
McConnell has rationalized his decision by saying the standards were different because the White House and the Senate were controlled by different parties in 2016, which is not the case this year.But at least two GOP senators indicated in interviews before Ginsburg’s death that they would not support filling a Supreme Court vacancy so close to Election Day, pledging to uphold the standard crafted by McConnell that most Senate Republicans adhered to in 2016.
Democrats were quick to jump on McConnell’s reversal from four years ago, as they pointed to McConnell’s reasoning in 2016 to hold up Obama’s final nominee to the Supreme Court.“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said in a statement. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” That was precisely the same statement issued by McConnell on Feb.
“If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election,” Graham said at an event hosted by the Atlantic magazine in October 2018. He made similar remarks in March 2016, when he said if a Republican was elected later that year and a vacancy occurred in the last year of their first term, “you can say, ‘Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler , who is facing not only a Democratic challenger but GOP Rep. Douglas A. Collins in Georgia’s top-two Senate election process this year, said she would support Trump “in nominating a strict constructionist before the election.”
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