Back in 2010, as President Obama was considering possible nominees to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, Judicial Crisis Network attorney Carrie Severino mused, “Of those the president could nominate, we could do a lot worse than Merrick Garland," adding that a Garland nomination could bring down “the tension and the politics” surrounding the brewing Supreme Court battle.
It must have been somewhat awkward for Severino, then, when President Obama did nominate Garland for the Supreme Court this year and she had to pivot to claiming that Garland is actually a liberal extremist who should never be confirmed by the Senate.
Of course, the objection that groups like JCN have to Garland’s nomination has nothing to do with the nominee. Instead, conservative groups, led by JCN, were pressuring Senate Republicans to block any Obama nominee to the Supreme Court even before Garland was named.
So it’s been amusing to watch JCN as it grasps for arguments to oppose Garland, the most recent being a web ad that the group is promoting in the home states of vulnerable Republican senators that derides Democrats for calling Garland a “moderate.” Instead, JCN told USA Today, Garland is a “liberal extremist.” The ad claims that under a Supreme Court with the “liberal extremist” Garland as a member, the Second Amendment would be “gutted” and “partial-birth abortion legalized” and Garland would become the “tie-breaking vote for Obama’s big government liberalism.”
We’ve already debunked JCN and its allies’ weak attempts at portraying Garland as “hostile” to gun rights. This is just reinforced by the fact that the only news source JCN could find to cite in its ad about Garland’s supposedly “strong hostility to gun owner rights” is the NRA’s magazine.
The “partial-birth” abortion claim is even more of a puzzle since, as far as we know, Garland has never ruled on the issue. That claim seems to be based entirely on the fact that Garland was nominated by President Obama.
Some conservative groups are not even bothering to claim that Garland is an unacceptable nominee and are instead focusing on bogus procedural arguments against considering his nomination. But JCN, Severino says, has a duty to be “out there combating the spin” about the nominee. That argument would be so much more convincing if the “spin” didn’t so closely resemble what she herself said just six years ago.
Of course, what can you expect from an organization that was founded as the Judicial Confirmation Network under President George W. Bush, only to completely change its name and core mission once President Obama took office.
