Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was hit with a brutal reminder by Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) after the Kentucky Republican complained about politics in the judicial nomination process.
In a Senate floor session on Monday, McConnell expressed outraged that two U.S. circuit court judges who had planned to step down decided to ‘unretire’ following the results of the November presidential election.
“This sort of partisan behavior undermines the integrity of the judiciary,” McConnell said. “Never, never before has a circuit judge unretired after a presidential election. It’s literally unprecedented.”
“These vacancies now properly belong to the next president,” he continued “As I repeatedly warned the judiciary in other matters, if you play political games, expect political prizes.”
However, Durbin reminded McConnell that there have been breaks from precedent in the past on judicial nominees including when McConnell refused to grant a confirmation hearing to President Barack Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016.
“I listened carefully to my colleague from Kentucky explain his concerns about the filling of four circuit court vacancies and he raises a question about whether that’s fair” Durbin said.
“Well, I’d like to call the Senate’s attention to the fact that there was a moment in time when we were shocked to learn that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died while on a hunting trip,” he continued. “And the decision was made almost instantly by the senator from Kentucky, the same senator who just talked about delaying and filling vacancies.”
“The decision was made by him not to fill the Supreme Court vacancy… so that Donald Trump was able to fill that vacancy, and not a situation where President Obama would have that option,” he added.
“So when I hear the Senator come to the floor from Kentucky and talk about whether there’s any gamesmanship going on, I don’t know,” Durbin continued. “But I will tell you that we saw it at the highest possible level in filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court when Anton Scalia passed away.”
When Obama nominated Garland eight months before the 2016 presidential election, McConnell refused to even hold a confirmation hearing, saying at the time that the American people should have a say in selecting the next SCOTUS justice.
McConnell took a different approach in 2020 when he announced that Trump’s nominee to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would get a vote in the Senate following the justice’s death two months before the election.
