Random American wrote:Despite the lack of comments by Trump floating a replacement, we know he will soon make that a priority. They won't apply the same standard that they did with Garland.
KurtFF8 wrote:I am curious to see how Trump supporters will justify that one.
Senator Majority Leader McConnell has already had his say in the issue:
McConnell says Senate will vote on Supreme CourtSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday that he will force a vote on whomever President Trump nominates to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, signaling a brutal fight later this year.
Mr. McConnell did not lay out timing, but said flatly that “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
Justice Ginsburg passed away Friday, with just weeks to go before the presidential election. She reportedly made a deathbed statement saying she wanted the seat to be filled by whoever wins in November.
That was the same logic Mr. McConnell used in 2016 to deny action on President Obama’s nominee to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February of that year, as the presidential primaries were underway.
But Mr. McConnell says that was different.
At that time the Senate was controlled by Republicans, while Mr. Obama was a Democrat. Mr. McConnell said this year there’s a Republican president and a GOP Senate.
“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year,” he said in a statement Friday.
“By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise,” he said.
To be fair, this was the same thing McConnell said at the time of the Garland nomination, Republicans even called it the Biden Rule after a statement Biden made on the floor of the Senate to its president in 1992, when he was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Of course, Biden's reasoning was a little different from the Republicans--or at least, his excuse:
"Some will criticize such a decision and say it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in the hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it. But that would not be our intention, Mr. President, if that were the course we were to choose in the Senate — to not consider holding hearings until after the election. Instead, it would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is under way, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over."
blackjack21 wrote:Indeed. However, there are a lot of Catholics on the court. Whatever happened to protestant jurists?
In this case, politics. With the possibility to influence Catholic voters and the problems Democrats would have attacking her because of her Catholic values (both because of Catholic voters and having an ostensible Catholic as head of their ticket), picking her could be a politically wise choice. She has a further advantage in that it hasn't been all that long since she was vetted by the Senate--when Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Manchin all voted for her.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
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