“It is my view that if the President goes the way of Presidents [Millard] Fillmore and [Andrew] Johnson, and presses an election year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over”.
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McConnell said Obama has the right to offer a nominee, and the Senate has “the right to withhold its consent”.
GOP members emerged from a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to announce that they would not vote on any Obama nominee to the United States supreme court, nor even hold a committee hearing on a nominee.
Republicans also argue that the Senate’s longstanding tradition is to not confirm justices in an election year, and they point to a June 1992 Senate speech by Vice President Joe Biden, then the DE senator, in which he argued that then President George H.W. Bush should not name a successor if a justice were to die or resign. There was no Supreme Court vacancy in that presidential election year, but Biden spoke against the committee’s consideration of any possible nominee before the election.
“In the same statement critics are pointing to today, I urged the Senate and White House to work together to overcome partisan differences to ensure the Court functions as the Founding Fathers intended”, he said.
Democrats have aligned themselves with Obama, arguing that he has more than 300 days left in the White House, and it would be detrimental to not have a ninth member of the Supreme Court for that long, NBC News reported.
Now it’s Vice President Joe Biden, who called on Senate Republicans last week to take up the Obama nominee, who is being confronted with his past.
The Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) released a survey Monday showing the political peril of objecting to any nominee Obama may put forward, as leading Senate Republicans have indicated they will do.
But the day we learned of Scalia’s death, McConnell went on Facebook to say the “vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president”. To make matters worse for the Obama White House, Biden is not the only prominent Democrat whose tune has changed.
All of the GOP presidential candidates have warned President Obama to let the newly elected president make the nomination.
“The Senate has exhibited little tendency to leave Supreme Court nominations without a final vote simply out of reluctance to act, or to use inaction as an indirect means of denying confirmation”, a 2011 report by the research service said.
Kirk’s statements come as he’s facing a hard re-election bid.
But at the same time, two moderate Republicans – Sens.
But it appeared unlikely that enough Republicans would peel away from McConnell to allow a vote on the Senate floor.
“They know how I feel”, he said of his party’s leaders, adding that he believes there should be hearings and votes for the eventual nominee.
“I find no mention of a three-year presidency in our Constitution”, countered Reid.
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“I would not, precisely because of Vice President Biden’s record when he served on the Judiciary Committee”, Earnest said.
