Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski won’t support a potential “double standard” for Senate Supreme Court confirmations.
With the 2020 general election only 91 days away, Senate Republicans are grappling with whether or not they would fill a vacancy on the high court. Some Republicans, such as Murkowski, feel the GOP should adhere to a 2016 precedent set by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, which prevented a Supreme Court confirmation during an election year.
“When Republicans held off Merrick Garland, it was because nine months prior to the election was too close. We needed to let people decide. And I agreed to do that. If we now say that months prior to the election is OK when nine months was not, that is a double standard, and I don’t believe we should do it,” Murkowski told the Hill this week. “So, I would not support it.”
Murkowski has repeatedly diverged from the consensuses among her Republican colleagues in the past, voting “present” during Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018 and opposing his nomination earlier on. The Alaska senator also said earlier this summer that she is “struggling” with whether or not she will support Trump in the upcoming election.
Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. However, McConnell declined to allow the Senate to vote on his nomination, saying the new president should have the ability to fill the vacancy.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, said his decision, in abstract, would be consistent with his choice in 2016.
“In the abstract, I would do the same thing in 2020 that I would in 2016,” Grassley said. However, he later said that the decision is ultimately up to Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Graham, who is up for reelection in South Carolina, said he would be “willing” to confirm a judge to a Supreme Court vacancy but would like to get further input from his GOP colleagues.
“We’ve got to see where the market is, what other senators think,” Graham said.
Other Republicans, including Sens. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, have declined to entertain the scenario.
“We do not have a vacancy on the Supreme Court. All nine justices are alive,” Collins said. “I’m not at a point where I have something to say,” Romney also said.
Republicans control 53 seats in the Senate and would not have room for more than three defections within their party should a nominee be voted on and all Democrats resist the president’s selection.
However, McConnell, the party leader, said he expects the Senate would fill a Supreme Court vacancy regardless of time.
“Oh, we’d fill it,” the Kentucky Republican told the Hill. During an appearance on Fox News in February, McConnell said that filling the vacancy would be consistent with his decision to block a vote on Garland in 2016.
“I said you’d have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy on the Supreme Court, occurring during a presidential election year, was confirmed by a Senate of a different party than the president. That was the situation in 2016. That would not be the situation in 2020,” he said.
“If you’re asking me a hypothetical about whether this Republican Senate would confirm a member of the Supreme Court to a vacancy created this year — yeah, we would fill it,” he concluded.
