Republicans Have Been Blocking Obama’s Nominee for 294 Days
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says Americans won’t “tolerate” Democrats blocking a president’s Supreme Court nominee. The five-term Kentucky Republican whose wife is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Transportation Dept. on Wednesday afternoon took Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to task before reporters, blasting the newly-promoted Democrat’s insistence his party should delay a nominee’s confirmation to the nation’s highest court should Trump choose a candidate who is not in the mainstream.
“The American people simply will not tolerate” Democrats blocking a Supreme Court nominee, McConnell told reporters, after mischaracterizing statements from many years ago made by then-Senator Joe Biden, and Sen. Schumer.
“I noticed my counterpart Sen. Schumer announced yesterday that their goal was to apparently never fill the Supreme Court vacancy,” McConnell said, falsely. “That’s kind of an expansion of the Biden rule,” he quipped. Republicans have been lying about what they call “the Biden rule” ever since the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia almost a year ago.
As Talking Points Memo aptly details, “When GOPers cited the ‘rule’ to block Garland last year, Democrats pointed out that Biden’s speech was about a hypothetical scenario and in the same speech he said he would be willing to consider a compromise moderate nominee.”
McConnell further mischaracterized Schumer’s remarks before reporters.
“Sen. Schumer said in the second Bush Administration he would not confirm the Supreme Court nominee in the last 18 months of President George Bush 43’s tenure. Apparently there is yet a new standard now, which is, to not confirm Supreme Court nominee at all,” the 74-year old McConnell falsely claimed.
What Senator Schumer said just this week was very clear: “If they don’t appoint someone who’s really good, we’re gonna oppose him tooth and nail.”
“They won’t have 60 votes to put in an out-of-the-mainstream nominee and then they’ll have to make a choice: change the rules,” Schumer said on MSNBC.Â
ThinkProgress Justice Editor Ian Millhiser offered this response to McConnell’s lying:
Of course, Republicans have been blocking President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court even before he was announced. Literally within hours of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, Republicans were publicly announcing they would not even hold hearings on any Obama nominee. They never did. President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on March 16, 2016 – 294 days ago. His nomination expired, ironically, perhaps, yesterday.
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