The Obama administration has reached out to all 100 Senate offices in its effort to convince the Senate to hold a debate and confirmation vote on President Obama’s upcoming nominee to the Supreme Court, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Friday.
However, Earnest would not reveal how soon Obama will put forward a candidate or discuss how many people the president is considering, and also wouldn’t confirm reports about individual potential justices supposedly being vetted.
“I just have to manage expectations here,” Earnest said. “I do not at any point expect to be in a position to confirm any individual, private meetings with potential candidates, either at the staff level or the presidential level.”
“I’m not gonna confirm and deny any individual candidates,” he said. “I can tell you the instructions that the president has given his legal team: ‘I want to find the best person for the job; and I want to evaluate this person based on their legal credentials. I want to evaluate this person based on their judicial temperament; I want to evaluate this person based on their life experience,'” Earnest quoted the president.
“I would expect that the president will have an opportunity to meet with his team before the end of the day today … to get some additional material that he can review over the weekend as he weighs this important decision,” Earnest said.
The White House has indicated that a nominee could be put forward as early as mid-March, since it has taken about a month to find nominees in the past, and Justice Antonin Scalia died on Feb. 13.
Meanwhile, the administration continued its full-court press to pressure the Senate into voting on his eventual nominee.
“[W]e’re going to continue to make a case, both publicly and privately, directly to senators and directly to the public, that their constitutional duty should come first,” Earnest said before noting the plea Vice President Joe Biden made to his former Senate colleagues in New York Times op-ed Thursday night.
“In my 36-year tenure in the United States Senate — nearly half of it as chairman or ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee — I presided or helped preside over nine nominees to the Supreme Court, from both Republican and Democratic presidents,” Biden wrote. “That’s more than anyone else alive today.”
“In every instance we adhered to the process explicitly laid out in the Constitution … That’s why I was so surprised and saddened to see Republican leaders tell President Obama and me that they would not even consider a Supreme Court nominee this year,” he wrote. “It is an unprecedented act of obstruction … I would ask my friends and colleagues — and all those who love the Senate — to think long and hard before going down this road.”
