McConnell refuses to allow Senate hearings for Supreme Court pick

[Teh One Who Knocks]

FOX News and The Associated Press


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President Obama named federal appeals judge Merrick Garland on Wednesday as his pick to succeed Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court – setting up a showdown with Republicans who have vowed to block the choice.

Obama, who said he went through a rigorous and comprehensive screening process, said Garland would bring “integrity, modesty and an even-handedness” to the Supreme Court.

“I said I would take this process seriously, and I did,” Obama said at the Rose Garden ceremony.

Yet within minutes, Republicans doubled down on their opposition to confirming any nominee in an election year, insisting that the vacant seat not be filled until a new president is sworn in.

“It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Obama, anticipating the swift resistance, urged Republicans to reconsider, adding it would be unprecedented for Garland not to at least get a hearing.

“I hope they’re fair. That’s all,” Obama said. “To give him a fair hearing and up or down vote.”

Obama said earlier Wednesday that it was both his “constitutional duty to nominate a justice and one of the most important decisions that I – or any president – will make.”

He added, “I’m doing my job. I hope that our senators will do their jobs, and move quickly to consider my nominee.”

A Senate confirmation is required for any nominee to join the bench.

Before the announcement, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also told Fox News that neither he nor his GOP colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee would back down and declared once more he would stop the nomination from going forward.

“We’ve been clear,” Lee said of his plan to reject Garland’s nomination.

Garland has served under both Republicans and Democrats. He clerked for the court’s liberal icon, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. In 1997, 32 Republicans voted in favor of his nomination, including seven who are still members of the Senate.

Garland was mentioned as a possible nominee when Justice Paul Stevens retired in 2010.

The vacancy ultimately went to Justice Elena Kagan.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democratic leader, called Garland's section, "a bipartisan choice," adding: "If the Republicans can't support him, who can they support?"

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who spoke to Obama Wednesday morning, said in brief remarks on the Senate floor that Republicans must act on the president's choice. "He's doing his job this morning, they should do theirs," said the Nevada Democrat.

If confirmed, Garland would be expected to align with the more liberal members, but he is not viewed as down-the-line liberal. Particularly on criminal defense and national security cases, he's earned a reputation as centrist, and one of the few Democratic-appointed judges Republicans might have fast-tracked to confirmation -- under other circumstances.

But in the current climate, Garland remains a tough sell. Republicans control the Senate, which must confirm any nominee, and GOP leaders want to leave the choice to the next president, denying Obama a chance to alter the ideological balance of the court before he leaves office next January. Republicans contend that a confirmation fight in an election year would be too politicized.

Ahead of Obama's announcement, the Republican Party set up a task force that will orchestrate attack ads, petitions and media outreach. The aim is to bolster Senate Republicans' strategy of denying consideration of Obama's nominee. The party's chairman, Reince Priebus, described it as the GOP's most comprehensive judicial response effort ever.

On the other side, Obama allies have been drafted to run a Democratic effort that will involve liberal groups that hope an Obama nominee could pull the high court's ideological balance to the left. The effort would target states where activists believe Republicans will feel political heat for opposing hearings once Obama announced his nominee.

For Obama, Garland represents a significant departure from his past two Supreme Court choices. In nominating Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the president eagerly seized the chance to broaden the court's diversity and rebalance the overwhelming male institution. Sotomayor was the first Hispanic confirmed to the court, Kagan only the fourth woman.

Garland -- a white, male jurist with an Ivy League pedigree and career spent largely in the upper echelon of the Washington's legal elite -- breaks no barriers. At 63 years old, he would be the oldest Supreme Court nominee since Lewis Powell, who was 64 when he was confirmed in late 1971.

Presidents tend to appoint young judges with the hope they will shape the court's direction for as long as possible.

Those factors had, until now, made Garland something of a perpetual bridesmaid, repeatedly on Obama's Supreme Court lists, but never chosen.

But Garland found his moment at time when Democrats are seeking to apply maximum pressure on Republicans. A key part of their strategy is casting Republicans as knee-jerk obstructionists ready to shoot down a nominee that many in their own ranks once considered a consensus candidate. In 2010, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch called Garland "terrific" and said he could be confirmed "virtually unanimously."

The White House planned to highlight Hatch's past support, as well as other glowing comments about Garland from conservatives.

A native of Chicago and graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Garland clerked for two appointees of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- the liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. and Judge Henry J. Friendly, for whom Chief Justice John Roberts also clerked.

In 1988, he gave up a plush partner's office in a powerhouse law firms to cut his teeth in criminal cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney, he joined the team prosecuting a Reagan White House aide charged with illegal lobbying and did early work on the drug case against then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. He held a top-ranking post in the Justice Department when he was dispatched to Oklahoma City the day after bombing at the federal courthouse to supervise the investigation. The case made his career and his reputation. He oversaw the convictions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and went on to supervise the investigation into Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

President Bill Clinton first nominated him to the D.C. Circuit in 1995.

His prolonged confirmation process may prove to have prepared him for the one ahead. Garland waited 2 1/2 years to win confirmation to the appeals court. Then, as now, one of the man blocking path was Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, argued he had no quarrel with Garland's credentials, but a beef with the notion of a Democratic president trying to fill a court he argued had too many seats.

Grassley ultimately relented, although he was not one of the 32 Republicans who voted in favor of Garland's confirmation. Nor was Sen. Mitch McConnell, the other major hurdle for Garland now. The Republicans who voted in favor of confirmation are Sen. Dan Coats, Sen. Thad Cochran, Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Pat Roberts.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Manu Raju and Ted Barrett, CNN


Washington (CNN)In an awkward meeting at the White House this month, Mitch McConnell had a message for his adversaries: Democrats had only themselves to blame for the escalating war over the Supreme Court.

McConnell, according to two sources familiar with the session, singled out the four Democrats in the room: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama himself. He said all four of them did something he and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley did not do: Attempt to filibuster Samuel Alito's nomination in 2006, setting a new precedent in the Supreme Court wars.

"You reap what you sow," McConnell said, according to the sources.

In the aftermath of Obama's Wednesday decision to nominate federal judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Republicans now are planning on setting yet another precedent: Denying confirmation hearings for a nominee, something that has not been done since such proceedings became common practice more than 60 years ago. The hardline has given Democrats ammunition against the GOP-led Senate for treating a qualified nominee unfairly, an argument they plan to make as they try to defeat a handful of vulnerable senators in swing states in November.

But in interviews with CNN, the Republican leadership's resolve to deny a hearing for Obama's pick only seemed to be hardening after the President's announcement. And they got backup from some key at-risk senators, who said that the next president -- not the current one-- should make the Supreme Court choice.

Vulnerable Republicans

That's a sign that vulnerable Republicans were betting that their base would reward them at the polls for standing firm to the President on a fight that could redefine the court for a generation.

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, one of the most endangered Republicans this year, said "out of courtesy and respect," she's "open" to meeting with Garland, breaking with McConnell, who opposes scheduling such a visit. But she was firmly in McConnell's camp when it came to whether Garland should be considered by the full Senate.

"I still believe this position is a lifetime appointment and one that will have a consequential impact on the country and the Supreme Court for decades to come. So I continue to believe that we should consider the people's view on this by waiting for the confirmation process to go forward after the elections in November," Ayotte said.

Other vulnerable senators, like Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, sided with Ayotte.

Democrats believe that public opinion is firmly on their side. In a March 3 CNN/ORC poll, 66% of voters said the GOP should hold hearings on the nominee, and Democrats believe the intense pressure campaign will force that number to grow.

Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Reid, said the GOP is taking obstruction to a whole new level.

"Mitch McConnell is the world's most accomplished hypocrite," Jentleson said. "Alito received fair hearings, floor consideration and was confirmed."

The public pressure will begin Thursday when Garland begins to make the rounds on Capitol Hill, as GOP senators are split on whether to even meet with him. It will intensify over the next two weeks in the home states of endangered Republican senators, with protests by activists that they hope can turn into negative media coverage over the GOP's hardline.

Democrats have privately circled July 4 as their target date to get the GOP to crack, before the party conventions that month, the August recess and a brief September session ahead of the November elections.

"I think the Republican leadership position is completely untenable and unsustainable," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut. "Because No. 1, the American people are absolutely fed up with a Senate that is stuck in gridlock and constant paralysis. What I hear most commonly from my constituents is 'why can't you get things done?'"

Some Republicans seemed receptive to that argument.

Sen. Mark Kirk, who faces a tough re-election in the blue state of Illinois, said he will "assess Judge Merrick Garland based on his record and qualifications."

And the Maine moderate, Sen. Susan Collins, who voted in 1997 to put Garland in his current spot as the chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said she'd meet with the judge and called on the Judiciary Committee to move forward with hearings.

"I believe the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold a hearing," Collins said. "That would be the normal course."

But Collins and Kirk are solidly in the minority of their caucus. Other GOP senators who voted for Garland in 1997, including Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, oppose moving forward on the nomination now.

"I supported him," Roberts said when asked why he voted for him in 1997.

Would he vote for him now?

'Let the people decide'

"It's not about the person," Roberts said, repeating the mantra from this party leadership. "It's about the process. Let the people decide."

Pennsylvania's Toomey, one of the vulnerable Republicans facing a tough re-election in a swing state, dashed from reporters in the Capitol Wednesday, refusing to take questions about Garland and whether he would meet with him. However, in a press release issued by his office, the first-term senator said a confirmation should wait until after the election "to give the American people a more direct voice" in picking a justice.

Another threatened Republican, Portman of Ohio, acknowledged he will face enormous pressure from Democrats and outside groups on the issue but said he still thinks a nominee should wait for a new president.

"I'm sure there will be ads on both sides. This is not about politics. It's about what's best for the country," he said.

Republicans believe it's worth spending some political capital in their standoff with Democrats to prevent a major shift in the direction of the court should the seat of the late Antonin Scalia, a reliable conservative, be filled by a more liberal justice.

The GOP holds a slim 54-46 majority in the Senate and must defend 24 seats in November compared to just 10 for Democrats if they are to maintain the majority. Republicans insist they won't get hurt politically by their defiant stand, arguing voters are more interested in terrorism, national security, jobs and the economy than a Supreme Court vacancy.

"We have a real comfort level in allowing the American people to voice their feelings about the direction of the Supreme Court," said Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate GOP's campaign committee. "We trust the people and we think they will appreciate being given an opportunity to speak first."