“Ayotte met with him, and the fact that they’re not calling for a hearing or a vote means they’re not doing their job”, Obama said.
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RedState, the influential conservative blog that has often helped shape the outcome of Republican primary elections and congressional Republican strategy, says its now time for Republicans to end their blockade of Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Senate Republicans and Barack Obama have already traded shots across the bow over Garland, who Obama nominated to replace Antonin Scalia. Now Hatch is one of the senators opposing Garland’s nomination.
Everybody thinks Donald Trump will lose the general election in November. More than 20 presidents have successfully made Supreme Court appointments during presidential election years or as lame ducks.
This morning representatives from Concerned Women for America, Iowa Right to Life, and Susan B. Anthony List delivered almost 4,000 petitions from Iowa pro-life activists to Senator Chuck Grassley’s Des Moines office, urging him to maintain his strong resolve to let the people have a say in the Supreme Court vacancy following Justice Scalia’s death. The committee’s study of Garland’s civil rights records considered opinions the judge wrote or joined during his 18 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Republicans must know that there is absolutely no chance that we will win the White House in 2016 now …
After taking the majority in the Senate in 2015, Republicans only confirmed 11 judges, the lowest number in over 50 years.
The president’s television interviews coincide with a push underway by the progressive group Americans United for Change that is bringing mobile billboards to nine states – Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Missouri and North Carolina – over nine days to push for confirmation of a ninth justice to the court. Garland is an excellent judge, about the best one could expect from Obama. I think it’s not just a disservice to America which of course it is. In discussing Grassley’s reticence, the president predicted Garland would nevertheless get a hearing and a confirmation.
“We are elected to vote yes or no, not ‘maybe.’ You should demand your senators do their job by providing this nominee a public hearing”.
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Turns out, Garland doesn’t look like such a bad nominee after all – at least not to the conservatives who are rightfully panicked by the repugnant ascent of Donald Trump. And Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey said that the two men “talked about concerns I have about his record and his judicial philosophy”, but that, “unfortunately, for me, throughout the process of this discussion, he did not assuage my concerns”, in particular whether he would play the checking role Grassley described.
