Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell steadfast in rejection but naysayers suggest process could go forward in Obama’s lame-duck period

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday underlined his determination not to allow a Senate vote on Barack Obama’s supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland, and rejected suggestions the process could go forward in Obama’s lame-duck period.

Obama nominates Merrick Garland, DC appeals court judge, to supreme court Read more

“A lot of people think this nominee ought to be decided by the next president,” McConnell said in an interview on CNN. He then asked, rhetorically, who should fill the vacancy on the court: “A lame-duck president on the way out the door or a president we’re in the process of electing right now?”

His Democratic counterpart, minority leader Harry Reid, countered that the Republican “facade” was “cracking” on the issue.

“We believe there should be a full vote,” Reid told NBC. “[McConnell] is marching his senators over a cliff and I don’t think they’re going to go. The facade is cracking and I think were going to get a breakthrough.”

Obama nominated Garland, a judge at the DC appeals court, on Wednesday. The vacancy on the court opened when conservative justice Antonin Scalia died on 13 February.

Some senators, including Republican Jeff Flake, have raised the possibility of Garland’s nomination being examined in the “lame-duck” period between November’s general election and the inauguration of Obama’s successor in January.

McConnell rejected the idea. “What’s the tradition?” he asked, saying it had been 80 years since the US had seen an analogous vacancy, and that “you have to go back to 1888 to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential year was filled by a Senate that was a different party by the president”.

The fact-checking website Politifact has found such claims wanting, writing: “‘Tradition’ [is] not consistent with judicial history. Should Republican lawmakers refuse to begin the process of confirming an Obama nomination, it would be the first time in modern history.”

McConnell also cast aspersion at Garland’s political leanings, which many have said are moderate enough to make him acceptable to Republicans.

“Even though Barack Obama calls him a moderate he’s opposed by the NRA,” he said, adding the National Federation of Independent Business also opposes Garland and the New York Times has said he would make the court more liberal.

“I can’t imagine that a Republican majority Congress, in a lame-duck session after the American people have spoken,” would confirm a nominee, McConnell concluded, saying he was 100% unwilling to take a hearing on any nominee.

“This is not about this particular judge,” he said. “This is about who should make the appointment.”

In a subsequent appearance on Fox News Sunday, McConnell said: “We need to focus on principle … the president nominates, we decide to confirm. But the American people need to weigh in, and they’ll do that in November.”

On the same show, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough responded: “We think it’s clear in the constitution that when there is a vacancy the president proposes a nominee and that’s been practice for decades or centuries.

“The nominee then goes before meetings and public hearings. Then they go before a vote in the committee and a vote in the Senate. That’s what you have to do. It’s that simple.”

Reid pointed to possible ramifications in the November congressional elections.

“I blame the Republicans,” he said. “Their excuses are lame. They’re going to end up losing seats. It’s so foolish.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have played political football with supreme court nominations. In 1992, then senator Joe Biden argued that the president, then Republican George HW Bush, should let voters elect a president before nominating anyone to the court, although there were no vacancies at the time. And Republican leaders, including McConnell and Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, both argued in the 2000s that the Senate should do its duty to consider and confirm a nominee from the sitting president.

“For the first time in 214 years, [Democrats] have changed the Senate’s ‘advise and consent’ responsibilities to ‘advise and obstruct,” McConnell said in 2005, when Republican George Bush was in office.