What was said

Chris Wallace: “Maybe I have this wrong, but when you blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination from President Obama, you basically said that we don’t do this in a presidential election year and that we wait until the election and then whoever the people choose, they get to pick the Supreme Court nominee.



But what you just said now was it’s a question of whether or not it’s the party in control of the Senate is different than the president. The question I guess I’m getting to here is, if Donald Trump were to name somebody in the final year of his first term in 2020, are you saying that you would go ahead with that nomination?”



Mr. McConnell: “Well, I understand your question. And what I told you is what the history of the Senate has been. You have to go back to 1880 to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential election year on the Supreme Court was confirmed by a Senate of a different party than the president.”

— interview on “Fox News Sunday” on Sunday

“What I did was entirely consistent with what the history of the Senate’s been in that situation going back to 1880.”

— Mr. McConnell, also on Sunday, in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation”

the facts

This is misleading.

After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat. At the time, Mr. McConnell cited a nonexistent tradition to insist that the Senate should not consider a nominee in a presidential election year.

On Sunday, a day after the Senate confirmed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Mr. McConnell was asked whether he would follow the tradition he cited in 2016. He responded, “We’ll see.”

Democrats have embellished Mr. McConnell’s remarks from 2016. But Mr. McConnell himself is now selectively omitting parts of them, and focusing on a different, misleading rationale to justify his actions two years ago.