Senate Democrats Should Remember Their Own Advice From 2016
Thomas Jipping /
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in February 2016, and President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to that vacancy on March 16, 2016.
The left had a single mantra for the Senate: Do your job. Specifically, they demanded that the confirmation process move forward, starting with a Judiciary Committee hearing.
They have changed their tune.
There’s no need to cover here all the reasons why the unique circumstances in 2016 justified allowing the next president to fill the Scalia vacancy. Republicans in 2016 were merely following Joe Biden’s advice. In 1992, when he chaired the Judiciary Committee, he recommended that the Senate not consider a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of a divisive presidential campaign.
In 2016, Democrats demanded that the Judiciary Committee hold a confirmation hearing on a Democratic nominee despite those unique circumstances. Today, Democrats object to the Judiciary Committee holding confirmation hearings even though those circumstances do not exist.
Keep in mind that 120 positions on life-tenured federal courts across the country remain vacant. In fact, we are in the longest sustained period of triple-digit judicial vacancies in 25 years.
Today’s situation is far less defensible, however. The high number of vacancies in the early 1990s was caused by Congress creating dozens of new judgeships. High vacancies today result simply from Democratic obstruction.
But despite these high current vacancies, Democrats are trying to prevent the Judiciary Committee from holding the hearings that, only two years ago, they said defined what it meant to “do your job.”
The committee was scheduled to hold regular confirmation hearings on Sept. 26 and Oct. 10 for nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. District Court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, first agreed to that schedule but then asked for multiple postponements. She then agreed to hold hearings on Oct. 10, 17, and 24.
Now, Judiciary Committee Democrats are demanding that these hearings be put off yet again. Their latest “reason” is that the full Senate is not in regular session until after the election. Yet Feinstein agreed to these October hearings knowing that the Senate would likely be in recess for at least some of this period.
This is not the first time that Democrats have done this. The previous complaint was that Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sometimes includes more than one appeals-court nominee in a single hearing.
They had to be reminded that chairmen of both parties, under presidents of both parties, have held more than 50 hearings with multiple appeals-court nominees. Chairmen Biden and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, for example, held more than a dozen such hearings for President Bill Clinton’s appeals court nominees while Feinstein served on the committee.
There’s no record that she had any objection to doing for Democratic nominees what she objects to doing for Republican nominees today.
With vacancies so high, Judiciary Committee Democrats should stop playing games, take their own advice, and do their job.
Originally published by National Review.