It is also the latest high-profile case that could deadlock the nation’s highest court in a 4-4 split as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to block the confirmation of federal Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to fill the court’s vacancy. He received Republican votes, including from McCain, in 1997 to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
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Democrats say that while every senator should meet with him, meetings are only a “first step” and a hearing is needed. Of those 36, the U.S. Senate never voted to confirm 25 of those individuals.
Ayotte, a first-term Republican who is up for re-election this fall, said she was upfront with Garland about her views during the 50-minute meeting in her office.
“I think they should because you have to have a full Supreme Court”, said one voter.
Republican Senate leaders have blocked consideration of Garland, saying the lifetime appointment should be made by the country’s next president, whoever is elected in November’s national election to replace Obama when he leaves office next January.
“The president is serious about holding the Senate accountable”, Mr. Earnest said.
Ayotte and almost all of her fellow GOP senators insist that the next president, rather than Obama, nominate a successor to the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February. “For Latinos, the courts are the last resort to protect our civil rights from the political scapegoating that we often see in electoral politics”.
“I think it’s safe to say that there will not be hearings or votes”, he told an interviewer.
But pressure is building for the Senate’s Republicans to reverse course. That coupled with pressure from people in their home states might prompt GOP leaders to reverse their stance that no president should be allowed to appoint a justice to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court in his or her past year in office.
Scalia was part of a five-member bloc of conservative justices that often held sway over the court’s four liberal justices in key rulings.
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If Senate Republicans hold firm, there’s another possibility looming: Campaigning in Iowa in January, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said she’d consider nominating Obama to the Supreme Court if she won the presidency. Justice Scalia was a conservative appointed by President Reagan, and the next Supreme Court justice should subscribe to a similar judicial philosophy.
