Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley fired back at Vice President Joe Biden following Biden’s Georgetown University Law Center address Thursday calling for the Senate to take up President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee this year.
“No matter how hard the White House tries to rewrite history, it can’t change then Chairman Biden’s remarks explaining how the president and Senate should handle a Supreme Court nomination arising during a heated presidential campaign,” Grassley said. “As Chairman Biden explained, the hyper-political environment is bad for the nominee, the court and ultimately the nation.”
Biden used Thursday’s address to try to neutralize a 1992 speech in which he said as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Senate should not consider Supreme Court nominees in a hyper-politicized election year. Biden said at the time that the nomination should be left to the the post-election session of Congress.
Democrats are criticizing the GOP for refusing to bring up the nomination of Judge Marrick Garland and using the same reasoning as Biden did in 1992.
On Thursday, Biden told Georgetown Law students that failing to confirm Garland to the high court this year would leave it unbalanced.
“While the vice president and others have tried to recast his 1992 speech as merely a call for greater cooperation, they neglect to mention that such cooperation, according to Chairman Biden, was to occur, “in the next administration,” and only after the presidential election.
The Republican National Committee piled on, calling the Thursday address a “weak attempt to walk back his own standard on opposing election-year Supreme Court nominees.”
The speech, the RNC said, “just can’t be taken seriously.”
