WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader [crscore]Mitch McConnell[/crscore] along with other Republican Senate leaders had a good laugh when The Daily Caller asked about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s and Vice President Joe Biden’s responses to their past remarks about blocking Republican Supreme Court nominees during election years.
“I know they say it doesn’t matter what they say in the past. I think Sen. [[crscore]Roger Wicker[/crscore]] summed it up rather well. We know what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. We know what would happen. A nominee of a Republican president would not be confirmed by a Democratic Senate when the vacancy was created in a presidential election year,” McConnell said.
“That’s a fact and some of their statements in the past are very inconvenient now and I’m sure they’d like to suggest they didn’t really mean it, but let me try one more time. The judiciary committee has unanimously recommended there be no hearings. I agree with that. And number two, this position will be filled by the next president elected in November,” he added
Democrats argue that Biden’s and Schumer’s past statements urging to block Republican presidential SCOTUS nominees, when their party held the upper chamber’s majority, should not be considered hypocritical since there was never any vacancy to fill at the time these remarks were made.
“It would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway — and it is — action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over,” Biden, then a Delaware senator and Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in June of 1992. “That is what is fair to the nominee and essential to the process.”
Schumer’s comments came much later in 2007 during the George W. Bush’s term in office.
“You know, the kind of obstructionism that [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell ‘s talking about, he’s hearkening back to his old days,” Schumer said. “In 2010, right after the election or right during the election, he said, ‘My number-one job is to defeat Barack Obama,’ without even knowing what Barack Obama was going to propose. Here, he doesn’t even know who the president’s going to propose and he said, ‘No, we’re not having hearings; we’re not going to go forward to leave the Supreme Court vacant at 300 days in a divided time.’”
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee announced Tuesday there are no plans to hold hearings or a vote in 2016 for any Supreme Court nominee President Obama put forth. Reid predicted last week that McConnell would cave on the issue and told reporters, “He hasn’t seen the pressure that’s going to build. It’s going to build in all the facets of the political constituencies in the country.”