Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and a host of other Democrats are all making the argument that “the American people deserve a fully staffed court of nine” and that it would be unconstitutional to leave it with eight:
Whichever RNC staffer did this deserves a promotion 👇
— IT Guy (@ITGuy1959) September 21, 2020
Obviously they were saying this about Judge Garland back in 2016 when Obama nominated him for SCOTUS on his way out of office, but now they’ve completely flipped.
Even Ginsburg herself said in 2016 that it’s the job of the Senate to assess a Supreme Court justice nominee, even in an election year:
But Justice Ginsburg was characteristically forthright, offering an unequivocal endorsement of Judge Garland.
“I think he is about as well qualified as any nominee to this court,” she said. “Super bright and very nice, very easy to deal with. And super prepared. He would be a great colleague.”
Asked if the Senate had an obligation to assess Judge Garland’s qualifications, her answer was immediate.
“That’s their job,” she said. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”
Sounds a little different from her alleged deathbed wishes.
There’s a lot of focus on what McConnell did (or didn’t do) in 2016 and many are calling him a hypocrite. But listen to this from Ted Cruz yesterday on ABC News, where he explains how Republicans were in agreement with historical precedent in 2016 and are so now again, in going forward with the nomination process:
According to Cruz, a vacancy on the Supreme Court has appeared in a election year 29 times in American history and all 29 times the sitting president has nominated someone. In 19 of those instances, the party of the president was the same as the party of the Senate and the nominee was confirmed by the Senate 17 times. The other 10 instances, when the party of the president was different than the party of the Senate, the nominee was only confirmed twice. In other words, our Republican Senate moving to confirm our Republican president’s nominee in this election year would be absolutely congruent with historical precedent. And Democrats trying to stop it would be antithetical to historical precedent.