Should U.S. Senate Republicans move forward with a hearing for President Obama’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee? Certainly, they are under no obligation to do so, since the Constitution’s “advise and consent” provision includes no timetables or any other instructions.
Senators can decide to take no action this year. Whether they make that decision is a policy choice (good or bad), not a violation of constitutional duty.
While the president and his supporters attempt to mislead people on this issue, they’ve run into a serious problem created by one of their own. Jonathan Tobin explains for Commentary.
It’s Joe Biden’s mess and, apparently, President Obama thinks the vice president is obligated to try and clean it up. The administration knows that Biden’s record is an impediment to its campaign to discredit the refusal of Senate Republicans to acquiesce to the president’s effort to ensure a liberal majority on the Supreme Court before his term ends. Under similar circumstances in 1992 — a president in the last year of his term and a Senate controlled by the other party — Biden stood up on the Senate floor and declared that Democrats would not even consider anyone nominated to the Supreme Court until after the presidential election was held. But now that the shoe is on the other foot and his party wants to secure the court before the people have their say in November, Biden is stuck explaining a speech that has made the GOP grateful for the wonders of the C-SPAN video archive.
Biden has been forced to eat his words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia gave the president an opportunity to tip the court to the left. More than Senator Chuck Schumer, who made a similar declaration about stopping any appointments from George W. Bush in the last 18 months of his term in office, Biden’s speech is the definitive argument against conducting a nasty and ideological battle over a Supreme Court nomination in the middle of a presidential election. So in order to put an end to the Republicans throwing the “Biden rule” in the face of Democratic opponents, Biden trooped to Georgetown University Law School to give a speech to put the whole thing to rest. Did he succeed? Not even close.
I won’t waste much time on Biden’s efforts to talk himself out of this predicament, and neither should anyone else. That inconvenient C-SPAN tape is still there refuting his efforts to say he didn’t say what he said in 1992, or that he didn’t mean it. Biden’s claim is that what he wanted was for the first President Bush to consult with the Democratic Senate majority before appointing another justice. But, like Schumer’s warning to the second Bush, Biden’s intent was clear. The Democrats wouldn’t go along with a Republican president getting another shot at changing the court with only months to go before an election could put a Democrat in the White House. Since replacing Scalia with a lifelong liberal Democrat like Garland would transform the court, Republicans feel the same way about Obama.