by Mary Margaret Olohan
Former vice president Joe Biden said in 2016 that he would have considered a Supreme Court justice nominee in an election year if the president had consulted the Senate on the nominee.
“I would go forward with the confirmation process as chairman even a few months before a presidential election. If the nominee were chosen with the advice and not merely the consent of the Senate just as the constitution requires,” Biden said during a 2016 speech at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The Democratic presidential nominee said Friday night that it would be improper for the Senate to vote on replacing former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died Friday, without “full consideration.”
“Let me be clear, the voters should pick the president and the president should pick the justice for the Senate to consider,” Biden, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, said Friday. “This was the position the Republican Senate took in 2016 when there were almost 10 months to go before the election. That’s the position the United States Senate must take today.”
As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Biden said in a 1992 speech that when a Supreme Court vacancy occurs in “the full throes of an election year,” the president should follow the example of “a majority of his predecessors” and hold off on making a nomination, the New York Times reported. If the president did make a SCOTUS nomination, Biden said the Senate should wait to hold a vote.
“Some will criticize such a decision and say that it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it, but that would not be our intention,” Biden said in 1992. “It would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.”
But Biden said in March 2016 that he would have gone “forward with the confirmation process” if the president had consulted the Senate, and said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans had selectively quoted his 1992 comments to justify not holding a vote on Chief Judge Merrick Garland.
At the time, former President Barack Obama was preparing to nominate Garland to replace former Justice Antonin Scalia, the Times reported.
“There’s no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off years — that’s not in the constitutional text,” Obama said at the time. Watch:
Biden knows (well maybe not) that he is comparing apples and oranges. Obama was a lame duck President. Trump is not.
Once again, it looks like the overwhelming majority of Americans disagree with the dems on this matter.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/09/20/poll-sorry-democrats-your-own-voters-support-supreme-court-nomination-hearings-for-a-2020-vacancy-n2576528
The democrat party is soon to go the way of the Whig party. When this election is over and President Trump is re-elected the fissure in the democrat party will be irreconcilable. The ultra left will take hold and the moderate traditional democrats will break with the party. The numbers of ultra left will be minimal and not strong enough to continue as a national party.
You know, pointing out that Biden or any other Democrat are hypocrites is hardly surprising, shocking or news.
@another vet: Obama simply should not have been allowed to fill the seat because he had a career of making terrible personnel choices. Well, terrible for America, anyway… great for those interested in seeing a powerful obstruction to socialism and oppression become weakened and eventually destroyed. He had already made two dismal choices, total leftist radical ideologues that serve social justice (as they see it) and not the Constitution.
@July 4th American: There will have to come a general and widespread awakening that the media, the DNC Ministry of Propaganda, is lying on an industrial scale and that the Democrats have been, on as large a scale, screwing them. That awakening is happening, but very slowly.