Senate leaders from both parties spent Thursday morning reading each others’ old quotes in an effort to show how they changed positions about the importance of moving judicial nominations late in a president’s term.
It was a debate C-SPAN labeled as a “tribute” to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But most of it was used by senators to keep fighting over whether the Senate should hold hearings and vote on an eventual nominee from President Obama, which Democrats want, or whether the Senate should ignore Obama’s pick and wait for the next president to nominate someone.
Both sides have already accused each other of making new arguments to fit the outcome they want, and both parties continued the fight on the Senate floor, starting with Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Reid showed up with a poster noting that in 2007, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., favored continued work on judicial nominees as President George W. Bush’s term was coming to a close.
“I will never agree to retreat from our responsibility to confirm qualified judicial nominees,” McConnell said then, according to a poster displayed by Reid.
“Fast forward nine years to today … as the senior senator from Kentucky abandons his responsibility to confirm a Supreme Court justice,” Reid said. “He’s leading the entire Republican caucus to retreat from their constitutional obligation.”
Reid was followed by Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, who quoted Reid as saying in 2005 that nothing in the Constitution says the Senate ever has to approve a judicial nominee. That was at a time when it was in the Democrats’ interest to hold back Bush appointees.
“The duties of the Senate are set forth in the U.S. Constitution,” Reid said, according to a poster displayed by Cornyn. “Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to give presidential appointees a vote.”
Republicans have sought to defend their decision to ignore Obama’s expected nominee by digging up other lines from Democrats.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for example, said in 2007 that the Senate “should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court.”
And Vice President Joe Biden, when he was a senator, encouraged Bush not to name a Supreme Court nominee toward the end of his presidency.
Senators later patched things up enough to vote 93-0 in favor of a resolution honoring Scalia’s service to the United States Supreme Court.
