Mitch McConnell, When Asked About a Potential Supreme Court Vacancy in 2020: ‘Oh, We’d Fill it’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who famously blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland through the entire 2016 election year, told a Kentucky audience that if there were a Supreme Court vacancy in 2020: “Oh, we’d fill it.”

According to a CNN report, McConnell made his remarks in response to a question at a local chamber of commerce meeting in his home state of Kentucky. At the event, he called his refusal to allow Garland’s nomination from moving forward: “the biggest decision I’ve made in my time in the Senate with the longest impact on the country.”

“I made the call in 2016 that we would not fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia in the last year  of the previous administration—a decision of enormous consequences,” McConnell said. “That provided an opportunity for the American people to speak up about who they wanted to make that decision.”

As to charges of hypocrisy on McConnell’s part, the Senator predicated blocking Garland in 2016 on the idea that there was a divided government at the time, with opposing parties in control of the White House and the Senate, which votes on Supreme Court nominations.

In 2016, Sen. McConnell argued that with a divided government (Dem White House, GOP Senate), the voters should decide who gets to appoint J. Scalia’s replacement.

That first condition does not apply. We don’t have a divide WH/Senate anymore.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) May 28, 2019

However, the Congress is again divided, with the American public sending a strong message about their views last year, when Democrats won a strong majority in the House in the 2018 midterm elections. And even though House members don’t vote on Supreme Court appointments, the higher principle that a “divided government” in an presidential election year should preclude final-year SCOTUS appointments so voters can weigh in with their vote would seem to still apply.

Screengrab via WPSD-TV.

from Mediaite http://bit.ly/2I3fH5D