Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday he would work to confirm a Supreme Court justice even if the vacancy occurs during the 2020 election year.

“We would certainly confirm a new justice if we had that opportunity,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said on host Hugh Hewitt's radio show.

A retirement or death would leave a vacancy on the high court that Democrats have insisted should remain open until the November 2020 presidential election is decided.

But McConnell is not going to wait and has the ability to seat a new high court justice appointed by President Trump thanks to the GOP’s three-seat majority.

McConnell infuriated Democrats in 2016 when he refused to take up the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy created following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Garland was selected by President Barack Obama, but McConnell, pointing to precedent, said he would not take up the nomination with the presidential election pending. Trump won and appointed Neil Gorsuch.

Democrats believe McConnell should employ the same policy and block the Senate from filling a vacancy that might occur in the 2020 election year and should instead wait until after the presidential election.

But McConnell told Hewitt, “People chose to kind of misinterpret what I said in 2016.”

McConnell said at the time he announced the Senate had long avoided taking up high court nominees in election years when the Senate was “a different party than the president.”

None of the justices have hinted that they plan to retire. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are in their 80s, and Ginsburg has been hospitalized recently.

[ Previous coverage: RBG scare: David Axelrod warns Supreme Court vacancy fight could 'tear this country apart']