‘This is an Election Year’: Lindsey Graham Addresses Elephant in the Room at Start of Amy Coney Barrett SCOTUS Hearing
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Monday defended Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court while acknowledging the political firestorm surrounding the process.
Ever since President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Democrats have staunchly opposed the effort to push Barrett through, and they’ve argued that the 2020 election should decide who will name Ginsburg’s replacement. As Graham got the hearing underway, he acknowledged the situation as he said “This is an election year. We’re confirming the judge in an election year after the voting has occurred.”
What will happen is that my Democratic colleagues will say this has never been done, and they’re right in this regard: nobody has ever been confirmed in an election year past July. The bottom line is Justice Ginsburg, when asked about this several years ago, said that a president serves four years, not three. There is nothing unconstitutional about this process. This is a vacancy that has occurred through a tragic loss of a great woman and we will fill that vacancy with another great woman.
Graham’s paraphrase of Ginsburg’s remarks come from 2016. At the time, she was urging the Republican-controlled Senate to hold hearings with Merrick Garland after former President Barack Obama nominated him to replace Justice Antonin Scalia after his death. Republicans refused to hold hearings back then, justifying their blockade with the rationale that the 2016 election should give the country a say on the Supreme Court’s future.
When Graham got around to Garland, he minimized the similarity of the political circumstances by saying “there has never been a situation where you had a president of one party and the senate of another where the nominee the replacement was made in an election year.”
“All I can say is I feel that we’re doing this constitutionally,” he said.
Graham declined to say anything about how he previously opposed the idea of nominating a new Supreme Court justice during an election year.
Watch above, via Fox News.
