Michael Barone has been a voice of reason in politics for decades; he currently writes for the Washington Examiner. Today he looks at what has been normal concerning Supreme Court nominations.
When a vacancy occurs in a presidential year and the opposition party has a majority in the Senate, the president can nominate, but the nominee is almost never confirmed. There have been 10 such vacancies in the history of the republic. Presidents made pre-Election Day nominations in six cases, but only one nominee was confirmed before the election. That was in 1888.
Presidents whose parties had Senate majorities selected nominees in election years 19 times, and 17 of those nominees were confirmed. The two rejections came together in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson’s nominee for chief justice, Abe Fortas, and his nominee to replace Fortas as associate justice were blocked by a bipartisan filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thus was following precedent when he blocked consideration of President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, and now, he is following precedent again by promising a floor vote on Trump’s nominee to fill Ginsburg’s seat.
Notwithstanding claims by Democrats to the contrary. All such are their usual self-serving lies.
So sayeth the “principal author of the Almanac of American Politics” which Wikipedia tells us “has been published biennially since 1972.”
