CNN is not sending its best.
A reporter with the cable network asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Tuesday why Republicans won’t honor the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alleged dying request that her seat be left vacant until after the 2020 election.
CNN’s Manu Raju took a break from his usual duties of stalking Republican senators in the Senate office buildings to ask McConnell at a press briefing, “Why not listen to her dying wish, apparently, to allow the next president to make this decision?”
The Kentucky lawmaker responded well, saying, “I prefer another thing she said recently, which was she thought the number on the Supreme Court ought to be nine.”
McConnell on RBG’s dying wish for next president to pick her replacement: “I prefer another thing she said recently, which was she thought the number of the Supreme Court ought to be nine”
McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland left SCOTUS with 8 justices for more than a year pic.twitter.com/MSmdJq5uXI
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 22, 2020
Before her death, Ginsburg reportedly dictated the following statement to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
This is the comment to which Raju referred Tuesday. McConnell, for his part, responded by appearing to refer to remarks Ginsburg made last year against court-packing.
“There is no fixed number in the Constitution,” the late justice said in 2019. “So, this court has had as few as five, as many as 10. Nine seems to be a good number, and it’s been that way for a long time.”
There is more.
In 2016, Ginsburg was asked whether the Senate had a responsibility to assess Judge Merrick Garland’s qualifications to sit on the court. She answered in the affirmative.
“That’s their job,” Ginsburg said. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”
She was also asked that year if an election-year vacancy should be filled by the winning candidate. Ginsburg balked.
“The president is elected for four years, not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four,” she said. “Maybe members of the Senate will wake up and appreciate that that’s how it should be.”
But even if Ginsburg had not argued against court-packing and in favor of the Senate and the president’s authority, what sort of nonsense question is this from Raju?
Why isn’t Ginsburg’s “dying wish” being honored? Because that is not how Supreme Court vacancies are filled? Because there is no “dying wish” clause in the U.S. Constitution? Because Supreme Court justices, alive or dead, don’t get a say in the confirmation process?
As I wrote previously when Democrats and their allies in the press first floated this manipulative “dying wish” nonsense: The president has the legal authority to nominate at any time a candidate to a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Senate has the authority to give its advice and consent. There is no law that says neither should exercise their respective constitutional powers during an election year. In fact, history and precedent say otherwise. Since 1795, nine justices have been nominated and confirmed to the court during a presidential election year, where the same party controlled the executive branch and the Senate. What Ginsburg reportedly dictated to her family is irrelevant. That is not how this works.
You would think that a “senior congressional correspondent” would know all of this. But when it comes to CNN, that is apparently expecting too much.
