White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday that there was “absolutely no good reason” to wait until a lame duck session to confirm President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
“There’s absolutely no good reason to wait until the lame duck for the Senate to fulfill their duty to the constitution and to the American people. The President has put forward a nominee just today that is eminently qualified. HIs credentials are unquestioned,” Earnest said during his daily media briefing. “Stalling his nomination and preventing him from serving on the Supreme Court at the beginning of the next term would be obstruction on a scale that is unprecedented in the last 40 years or so.”
Obama announced Wednesday morning from the White House’s Rose Garden that he was nominating Judge Merrick Garland and called for a “fair” process that would allow the D.C. circuit court judge an interview and a vote in the Senate.
“Nobody is suggesting that politics should be fully extracted from it. What we’re suggesting is that politics should not prevent the basic institutional functioning of the United States Senate,” Earnest continued. “And the consequences are significant. Having the process break down would be an unprecedented injection of partisan politics into the Supreme Court.”
Republicans need to get one of their Wall Street donors to explain how a hedge works. (Hint: you don’t get to call the coin toss after you’ve seen how it landed.)
Waiting for the lame-duck session would be kind of like insider trading (which of course never happens on Wall Street).
I kind of thought Bush v. Gore was the “unprecedented injection of partisan politics into the Supreme Court”.
“There’s absolutely no good reason to wait until the lame duck for the Senate to fulfill their duty to the constitution and to the American people.”
Wait, Josh. Republicans say their stance is based on a time-honored “principle” of “Fuck Obama and the Kenyan horse he rode in on.” It shall heretofore be applied in the first, last years and every one in between of any nonwhite president now and in the future. Otherwise their GOP party gets out of control angry and nominate crazy people to be the president that follows.
The Republicans need to double down and go all in. That will show the nation that they mean what they say on camera.