PITTSBURGH (AP) _ President Barack Obama has nominated a federal prosecutor from Pittsburgh to fill a seat on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said.
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While there’s really no good reason for Republicans to not nominate Garland to the bench, that’s not stopping Republicans from even refusing to hold hearings on the president’s nominations. As Ed Whelan, a former Scalia clerk told the Washington Post in April, Garland was the best nominee conservatives could hope for under a Democratic president. Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland has Republicans nervous he could tilt the court in a more liberal direction.
Given this vacancy’s rarity and significance, the right thing to do is to give the American people a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice.
While a large majority of Republicans (56%) disapprove of Obama nominating Garland, only half that number (29%) actually think that he would be a bad Supreme Court justice.
Lately I’ve been arguing with lefty acquaintances of mine who say, “Isn’t it awful for the Republicans to play tit-for-tat over Court nominations” that surely they don’t seriously expect Republicans never to reciprocate for the shameful treatment of Republican judicial nominees, starting with Bork.
About 75 percent of Democrats want a vote on Garland, the poll showed, while about two-thirds of Republicans said they didn’t want a vote. “We need judges like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes and [Louis] Brandeis and [Benjamin] Cardozo on the courts of the United States”, said then-Republican Arlen Specter that day.
Chemerinsky also cites this Wednesday’s controversial Supreme Court hearing on birth control, religious liberty and the Affordable Care Act, which lower federal courts have ruled on differently. Like every question before the Senate when it considers a nomination, the judgment to be made is a political one. As much experience as Garland had fighting for almost two years to be confirmed by a largely friendly Senate last time, this process is going to be a whole lot more hard.
But now, according to Klain, who served as chief of staff to Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Al Gore and Attorney General Janet Reno, the Supreme Court confirmation process has become “very highly politicized, very highly partisanized and very polarized” to the point where presidential nominees are not even given a fair shot at confirmation.
They didn’t succeed of course, but they did devote the rest of Obama’s term to trying to make him irrelevant. As a sterling jurist and a moderating influence, Mr. Garland seems the ideal choice to help restore respect for the court – which is why Republican senators should give up their gamble and confirm Merrick Garland as soon as they can.
But even if we were to follow McConnell’s logic that American voters should metaphorically have their say – they already have. “Interest groups and partisans will dive in with no holds barred, but neither the nominee nor the senators will have the opportunity to talk through important issues at stake in the relatively more disciplined format the confirmation hearings can provide”.
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McDonough: We will stand by him from now until he is confirmed and he’s sitting on the Supreme Court. But the schedule in the Senate is set by the majority leader. It is undeniably true that President Ronald Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy during the election year of 1988.
