Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren dismissed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's vow this weekend to not allow a confirmation for a Supreme Court justice replacement this year. | Getty Democrats assail McConnell over Scalia successor Schumer and Warren brand the Senate Republican leader as an obstructionist.

Leading Senate Democrats pounced on Mitch McConnell’s vows to bar a replacement for deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday, arguing that Republicans will be damaged politically by appearing to invalidate the last 11 months of President Barack Obama’s presidency.

After spending much of Saturday evening standing behind Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s calls for Senate Majority Leader McConnell to take up a nominee, Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts unleashed a torrent of attacks on McConnell as an obstructionist who could pay dearly for his plan to ignore whoever Obama sends over in the next year.


In an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Schumer predicted that McConnell will fold due to divisions in his own conference. No Senate Republicans have yet broken with McConnell, but Democrats believe his vulnerable lawmakers up for reelection this year may begin feeling political heat if they stand with leading GOP presidential contenders and congressional leadership in the way of a new justice being considered for confirmation.

McConnell "doesn’t even know who the president is going to propose. And he says, ‘No, we’re not having hearings, we’re not going to go forward. [Leaving] the Supreme Court vacant for 300 days in a divided time? This kind of obstructionism isn’t going to last,” Schumer said.

“The American people don’t like this obstructionism ... a lot of the mainstream Republicans are going to say: ‘I may not follow this.’”

Warren also went hard at McConnell, using against him his own Saturday comments that the “American people should have a voice” in Scalia’s replacement.

“In fact, they did — when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes,” Warren said in a statement. “Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says the President of the United States nominates justices to the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate. I can't find a clause that says '... except when there's a year left in the term of a Democratic president.'”

Still, McConnell is merely playing out what his party is demanding of him. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on Sunday that he will filibuster a nominee no matter who it is, and other leading presidential candidates have either deferred to McConnell or stated that the vacancy should wait until the next president.

Should McConnell have proceeded with a different tactic, he’d have created an internal war within the party. By stating the vacancy should be filled by the next president, he’s likely to get backing from most, if not all, of his Senate Republican members, as well as conservative groups like Heritage Action.

Obama said Saturday he will send a nomination to the Senate, and Schumer predicted it will be a nominee designed to get Republican votes rather than a very liberal appointee. A senior Republican said Sunday morning that McConnell is not demanding that the president avoid nominating a replacement for Scalia, but instead speaking to his own plans as majority leader.

“He didn’t say [the president] doesn’t have the authority to nominate anyone, so I think they’re talking about something that didn’t happen,” the GOP aide said.

Democrats argue that, in actuality, McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are telegraphing plans to delay a Supreme Court confirmation for even longer than it appears. Once a new president assumes office in 2017, it will take time for a nomination to be sent to the Senate, and then take weeks for the Senate to take up the nomination and process it.

It could easily be 13 or 14 months before the Supreme Court has its full slate of nine justices again, Democrats said.

“What they’re saying is something that we’ve never heard” before, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Saturday night. “It does not pass the laugh test.”

On Sunday on CNN, Leahy added that if Republicans don’t change direction it “is going to guarantee they lose control of the Senate.”

In 2013, Democrats went out of their way to preserve their own sway over the process should a Supreme Court vacancy ever occur, leaving the confirmation threshold at 60 votes after changing it to a simple majority for all other presidential nominees. Should McConnell hold the Senate and a Republican win the White House this fall, Democrats will be able to block a more conservative, anti-abortion justice.