Republicans argued Thursday that this year’s chaotic election season is a major reason why they should ignore President Obama’s expected Supreme Court nomination this year, and allow the next president to decide who should replace Scalia.
“It just seems to me that this is a presidential election mess,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, a top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, during a committee hearing. “I’ve never seen it worse. I’ve never seen the country more at odds, more on edge, about a presidential election process.”
The committee met Thursday to consider lower-court nominees, but the discussion quickly shifted to the high court vacancy, which has created a bitter partisan battle in the Senate.
The debate raged as Capitol Hill Republicans fretted privately and publicly over the possibility of “outsider” candidate and delegate leader Donald Trump winning the GOP presidential nomination. On the Democratic side, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, has continued to upset the Clinton campaign, most recently with an unexpected primary victory in Michigan.
Obama, meanwhile, could announce his nominee as early as next week, but Republicans won’t be in any rush to consider the candidate in the Senate.
“We are not going to drop any nominee into an election year cauldron,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Republicans announced last month they would not take up a Supreme Court nomination in the final year of Obama’s presidency and would instead leave the matter to the 2017 Senate session. The move would leave the court with eight justices instead of nine until at least early next year.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died on Feb. 13.
Republicans argue the delay will let voters have a say in the nomination when they choose the next president in the 2016 presidential election.
“Who will replace Justice Scalia?” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said. “It will be decided in the next election. This is not an unreasonable position.”
Democrats on the panel said Republicans are ignoring a constitutional duty to consider the president’s nominee.
“The president will nominate soon a person,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is the top Democrat on the panel. “He’ll fulfill his duty that he is sworn to do … and I would remind everybody that consideration of a Supreme Court nominee is a constitutional duty of each and every senator.”
But Republicans argued that the Judiciary Committee wasn’t created until nearly three decades after the Constitution was written. “Enough of these absurd claims about what the Constitution plainly does not require,” Hatch said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Senate Republicans are flouting the intention of the Constitution, no matter whether it specifically outlined the Senate’s duties. “The Constitution did not anticipate that we would just sit there and wait a year,” she said.
Lawmakers also made their arguments based on historical precedent.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said no Supreme Court seat has been left vacant for more than a year since before the Civil War.
But Sessions countered that the Senate, under similar political circumstances, has not confirmed a Supreme Court justice in the final year of a president’s term in office since 1888.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Senate Republicans are reacting to a move by Democrats in 2013 that changed the threshold for appointing lower court judges to 51 votes instead of 60. Now Republicans are making their mark on the judicial process, he said.
“We are setting a precedent today,” Graham said. “Republicans are saying in the last year of a presidency you are not going to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court based on what we are doing today. That is going to be the new rule.”
