President Obama said Saturday that a failure by the Senate to vote on Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court ”would hurt our democracy” and demonstrate that the confirmation system is “beyond repair.”
“I ask Republicans in the Senate to give Judge Garland the respect he has earned,” Obama said in his weekly address. “Give him a hearing. Give him an up-or-down vote. To deny it would be an abdication of the Senate’s Constitutional duty.”
Senate Republicans have refused to allow a vote or even a hearing on Garland this year in a bid to prevent or a delay a sharp shift in the power on the high court. Obama and Democrats call that plan an unprecedented act of partisan obstruction.
“To go down that path would jeopardize our system of justice, it would hurt our democracy, and betray the vision of our founding,” Obama said.
“It would indicate a process for nominating and confirming judges that is beyond repair,” he said. “It would make it increasingly impossible for any President, Republican or Democrat, to carry out their Constitutional function.
Obama touted elements of Garland’s biography that he highlighted in Wednesday’s announcement: Garland’s Chicago roots, his service on the D.C. Circuit, his prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombing, and his tutoring of Washington, D.C. school children.
“At a time when our politics are so polarized; when norms and customs of our political rhetoric seem to be corroding – this is precisely the time we should treat the appointment of a Supreme Court justice with the seriousness it deserves,” Obama said.
