Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday that President Trump might not have defeated Hillary Clinton in November had the Supreme Court not been a major issue in the 2016 campaign.
In hindsight, the Kentucky Republican said, his decision to block former President Barack Obama from appointing a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia was probably the decisive factor in Trump’s victory, given GOP voters’ strong reservations about him.
McConnell spoke to the Washington Examiner just after Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to fill a vacant seat on the high court.
“At the end, this issue more than any other, elected Donald Trump, because, at the end, you had two candidates who were overwhelmingly unpopular,” McConnell said. “Nobody was predicting Trump would get 90 percent of the Republican vote just like Mitt Romney did [in 2012,] but he did. And the single biggest reason was, they wanted him to make the Supreme Court appointment, not Hillary Clinton.”
Scalia died Feb. 13, 2016, the same night as a Republican presidential debate. McConnell moved within hours, declaring that whoever Obama nominated wouldn’t receive so much as a hearing in the Judiciary Committee, let alone a floor vote on confirmation.
Let the voters decide, McConnell said, to protests from the Democrats.
McConnell conceded that he wasn’t sure if his gambit would pay off. For much of the 2016 contest, Clinton appeared headed toward victory. But the majority leader said that he that he never considered backtracking and proceeding with Obama’s choice of Judge Merrick Garland, because he would have lost all credibility.
“This call was made in February. We didn’t know who are nominee was going to be yet,” McConnell said. “What I did not predict was that we would nominate somebody who a lot of Republicans questioned whether he was a Republican. I mean after all, Donald Trump was having fundraisers for [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer four or five years ago.”
Once it was apparent Trump would be the nominee, McConnell was among those who recommended that the now-president consult with conservative groups and assemble a list of potential conservative judges to choose from for the Supreme Court slot that he was holding open.
Gorsuch was on that list, and conservatives skeptical of Trump cheered earlier this year when the president nominated him.
The Democrats filibustered Gorsuch, and rather than let them block him from the court, McConnell on Thursday invoked the so-called nuclear option, reducing the threshold to overcome the blockade from 60 votes, to 51.
McConnell said he assumed from the outset that he was going to have to go nuclear to seat Gorsuch, and never had second thoughts. Back in 2013, the Democrats, then in control of the Senate, took similar action to reduce the ability to filibuster all executive branch nominees except those to the high court.
“I don’t think what happened yesterday was much of a surprise,” McConnell said. “Even though there was some reluctance on our side, my members understood that no Republican president would be able to get any Supreme Court justice confirmed unless we did what we did.”
