Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that the Senate is a co-equal partner with the president in confirming nominees to the Supreme Court.
At an event sponsored by Punchbowl News, McConnell said Republicans opposing the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, found her “attitude about sentencing with certain kinds of criminal cases” and her answers to questions about court-packing “troubling.”
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“I think she’s the kind of nominee the president would want, and I don’t think he’ll be disappointed in her performance over the years,” the Kentucky Republican said.
Sen. Susan Collins announced this week she would support Jackson’s nomination, becoming the first, and potentially the only, Republican to do so. In a statement explaining her decision, Collins argued that the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were both confirmed by wide bipartisan margins.
Asked why that kind of bipartisan support for Supreme Court nominees no longer seems possible, McConnell argued the tide began to change when “Democrats assassinated Robert Bork,” who was nominated in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan but not confirmed.
“It was pretty clear that we’re moving into a period of, at least at that point, periodic assertiveness, of ‘advise and consent,’ what does it mean? It means whatever the Senate, at any given time, wants it to mean,” McConnell said.
He said that despite some bipartisan lulls, the Senate has shifted into an assertive mode in the confirmation process.
“For the foreseeable future, I think the confirmation process is going to be viewed by senators as a co-responsibility. In other words, the president gets to initiate, but we’re full partners and in the process,” said the senator from Kentucky.
McConnell said previous norms were that the Senate owed the president deference on nominees, assuming they had the qualifications for the job. But that is no longer the case, he argued.
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“The Senate believes it is a co-partner with the president in the business of confirming lifetime appointments,” he said.
