While Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee promised a fair vetting process for whomever President Joe Biden chooses as the next Supreme Court nominee, their standards for fairness may be defined differently.
Both Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Republican committee member Sen. Tom Cotton appeared on Sunday morning talk shows to discuss what the Judiciary Committee process could look like once a nominee is named.
Sen. Durbin appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying the speed at which the committee works depends on how well-known the nominee is and promising the process would be timely and fair.
“It’s going to be fair, it’s going to be deliberate, and we’re going to be timely about it, too,” Durbin told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. We should take it seriously.”
Todd pressed Durbin whether a Judiciary Committee decision could be expected by Congress’s Easter recess.
“By the Amy Coney Barrett test, yes, it is,” Durbin said, referencing the speedy, 27-day time frame it took Amy Coney Barret to go from nomination to confirmation before the end of then-President Donald Trump’s presidency. “We’ll see what develops. A great deal, maybe all of it, depends on the nominee and the background of the nominee.”
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Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also told Dana Perino on Fox News Sunday that the questioning would be fair — not “the [Democrats’] kind of grotesque smear campaign against the character” of past nominees.
“I will try to ask questions that contain a bit more logic than Kamala Harris’s line of questioning,” Cotton said. “We’ll give a thorough vetting into any nominee’s legal philosophies, as well as their career, and their character and their temperament, but we’re not going to do what Democrats do, which is simply make up smears against a nominee. I hope that never happens again.”
Cotton also said he did not have confidence in Biden’s ability to choose a nominee whom Republicans can get behind.
“I suspect we will all keep an open mind,” Cotton said. “We will review the nominee on her merits. I can’t say that I’ve got wild expectations that Joe Biden is going to nominate someone who I think I can support or many Republicans can support, because I’ve seen dozens of his nominees to the lower courts, and they’ve almost, to a person, been left-wing ideologues who think judges should make the law rather than apply and uphold the Constitution and the laws as they are passed.”
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If approved, Biden’s nominee would fill the Supreme Court vacancy soon to be left by Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement last week. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised a quick process to fill Breyer’s seat as soon as possible. President Biden has said he will nominate a black woman to the bench by the end of February.
