USA TODAY Opinion

In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat left vacant by the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that “Article II, Section II of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent, as it deems necessary,” and that tradition holds that when a Supreme Court vacancy exists in an election year when there is a president of one party and a Senate controlled by the other, the nomination should wait until after the election. Eleven Republican Senators, in a letter to Majority Leader McConnell, wrote that you have to go back to 1888 “in order to find an election-year nominee who was nominated and confirmed under divided government, as we have now.”