A senior Republican senator said Republican leaders should hold a vote on President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I would rather have [constituents] complaining to me that I voted wrong on nominating somebody than saying I’m not doing my job,” Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told the Garden City Telegram Monday.
Moran’s comment suggests that the Democratic messaging of “do your job” stings some Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged not to hold hearings for Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic operatives hope that the issue will damage Republican senators facing re-election this year.
Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday accused Republicans of staging “a constitutional crisis in the making” by refusing to hold hearings. “My consistent advice to presidents of both parties has been that they should engage fully in the constitutional process of ‘advice and consent’ — and my consistent understanding of the Constitution has been that the Senate must then do so as well,” Biden said Thursday. “Period.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley replied by citing then-Sen. Biden’s 1992 speech in which he pledged to block any nominee that President George H.W. Bush might put forward until after the 1992 presidential elections. “As Chairman Biden explained, the hyper-political environment is bad for the nominee, the court and ultimately the nation,” Grassley said.
Biden said that opposition to Republican-appointed Supreme Court nominees, including the successful takedown of Robert Bork in 1987 and the attempt to block Clarence Thomas’s accession to the high court, never included denying them a hearing. “In my time as the ranking Democrat or as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was responsible for eight nominees to the Supreme Court — some I supported, others I voted against,” he said.
Moran predicted that he would vote against any Obama nominee who received a hearing.
“I can’t imagine the president has or will nominate somebody that meets my criteria, but I have my job to do,” he said.
