GOP talking points have continued to fall apart upon even minimal reflection and scrutiny, only to be revised and discredited yet again. That is not a surprise, since they were so hastily thrown together as a post-hoc justification for a political decision Mitch McConnell made with unseemly haste as soon as he heard that Justice Scalia had passed away.
Now Republicans are trying out some new iterations in a desperate attempt to find some rationale to justify their decision to not do their job and consider – or even meet with – the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
For instance, Sen. Orrin Hatch says:
although in recent years it’s become customary to hold hearings on Supreme Court nominations, for the first 130 years of our nation’s history the Senate never held a hearing on any Supreme Court nominee
They didn’t have hearings, but that doesn’t mean the Judiciary Committee and Senate simply ignored the nomination. It just means the Judiciary Committee and full Senate did their job and fully considered the merits of the nominations without feeling there was a need for hearings at the beginning of the process. That is a far cry from today, when not having committee hearings means the Senate not taking any actions whatsoever to consider the nomination. The senator’s argument is so pitifully irrelevant as to show that the GOP is desperate to trick the American people into thinking there is some principle behind their decision.
Hatch also says:
And a justice has never died in office this late in a term-limited President’s last year, when voting on the President’s successor has already begun.
As GOP talking points are repeatedly refuted by fact, they keep modifying them. Before, they were suggesting there was no precedent for SCOTUS confirmations in an election year. As Justice Kennedy can attest, that simply is not true. Now they add more detail – when the vacancy is due to death, this late in an election year, but only an election year where the president is term-limited. Of course, presidents were not term limited until the 22nd Amendment was adopted in 1951 (when Sen. Hatch was 16), so as a historical example, it conveniently ignores the vast majority of American history.
It also implicitly refutes the GOP’s own previous suggestion that they were acting in conformity with tradition. If their newest TP is that this is a situation that has never arisen before (given their narrowing of the conditions), then they are also admitting that their decision to do their job is without historical precedent. And they are right, as Lindsey Graham has candidly acknowledged.
Hatch also picks out a completely irrelevant historical example to justify inaction on the part of Senate Republicans:
In one case, Congress even abolished a Supreme Court seat rather than confirm the President’s nominee.
He is referring to a nomination by Andrew Johnson, where one house of Congress had already passed the bill eliminating the seat before the nomination was even made. Eliminating a seat is action, not inaction. Republicans are not talking about exercising congressional authority to establish the number of seats on the Supreme Court. To the contrary, they are talking about eliminating the president’s constitutional authority to make nominations to fill the seats that Congress has established. They want to keep the seat in existence, but just have it occupied by a justice selected by someone other than the person Americans already elected to fill it.
While Senate Republicans continue to throw out new post-hoc justifications in the hopes that something will stick, President Obama is doing his job. Today, he is nominating someone to the Supreme Court. Now the Senate needs to do their job and give the nominee timely consideration.