Gregory Korte

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Obama suggested Monday that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump isn't qualified to nominate justices to the Supreme Court — and therefore the Republican-controlled Senate should give his nominee a hearing and a vote.

In a live-streamed interview with the website Buzzfeed, Obama said the Republican vow not to give Chief Judge Merrick Garland a hearing could come back to bite them if a Republican president is elected.

"Now what we have is a situation where having made that promise, Republicans are looking at a Republican nominee who many of them say isn’t qualified to be president, much less appoint somebody," Obama said. "And it seems to me they'd be better off going ahead and giving an hearing and a vote to someone who they themselves have said is well qualified."

Trump, who has all but sewn up the GOP nomination, is in the process of trying to unify various wings of the party — including anti-abortion conservatives skeptical about his views on abortion. In response, Trump told Fox News last week that he would appoint conservative, pro-life judges to the Supreme Court.

Trump has not yet made good on a promise to release a short list of potential Supreme Court picks — something Obama suggested would be a mistake.

"Precisely because this election year has been so crazy, precisely because you have a number of Republicans who have said that they have concerns about this nominee, shows you why you shouldn’t want to politicize a Supreme Court appointment," Obama told Buzzfeed.

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Obama also reiterated an argument that denying his nominee a hearing could create a precedent that would make it all but impossible to get any nominee confirmed.

"Let's say a Republican president in the future is trying to appoint somebody. Democrats are going to do the same thing, and it's going to be tit for tat and pretty soon were going to have a situation where we can't fill our Supreme Court," he said. "And that then means that laws are going to be different in different states and different jurisdictions, and people are going to be confused about what the rules are, and that's not how our democracy is supposed to work."