The Garland SCOTUS appointment
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I wasn't aware of this.
When McConnell refused to bring the Garland nomination to the Senate during the last year of the Obama term, the outrage was everywhere.
I was not aware of the Schumer precedent:
In July 2007 the New York Democrat gave a speech to a progressive legal society in which he said this about confirming a George W. Bush nominee in the last 18 months of his Presidency as recounted in Politico:
“‘We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,’ Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington. ‘The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice [John Paul] Stevens replaced by another [Chief Justice John] Roberts, or Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg by another [Samuel] Alito.’” Mr. Schumer went on to say that he would recommend to his Senate colleagues “that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances.”
He denies he meant anything by it, of course.
In a post on Medium, the Majority-Leader-in-waiting now claims that his 2007 speech was little more than a suggestion that “Democrats, after a hearing, should entertain voting no if the nominee is out of the mainstream and tries to cover that fact up. There was no hint anywhere in the speech that there shouldn’t be hearings or a vote.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Schumer, his own words were on the record and are online. Consider this somewhat less than subtle hint: “I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee EXCEPT in extraordinary circumstances.” The emphasis is Mr. Schumer’s in his prepared remarks.
Mr. Schumer never said that nominees were entitled to a hearing much less an up-or-down vote, and along with then-Senator Barack Obama he joined a filibuster of now-Justice Samuel Alito in 2005. Among the Senator’s major themes at the time was that the confirmation hearings process is of “limited usefulness” and “often meaningless.”
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I can easily imagine us not filling any future SCOTUS positions unless the president’s party has control in the senate, regardless of how many years are left in a presidential term.
