Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that the Senate is a co-equal partner with the Presidency in confirming nominees to the Supreme Court.
At an event funded by Punchbowl News, McConnell said Republicans opposing the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, found her “attitude about sentencing with certain kinds of criminal cases” and her response to inquiries concerning court-packing “troubling.”
“I think she’s the kind of nominee the president would want, and I don’t think he’ll be disappointed in her performance over the years,” the Kentucky Republican said.
Sen. Susan Collins revealed this week that she would unsurprisingly support Jackson’s nomination, becoming the first, and also potentially the just, Republican to do so. In a declaration discussing her choice, Collins argued in a completely inept attempt at false equivalence that the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were both validated by vast bipartisan margins.
Asked why that kind of bipartisan assistance for Supreme Court nominees no longer seems possible, McConnell said the tide started to transform when “Democrats assassinated Robert Bork,” a SCOTUS nominee in 1987 from President Ronald Reagan who was not confirmed.
“It was pretty clear that we’re moving into a period of, at least at that point, periodic assertiveness, of ‘advise and consent,’ what does it mean? It means whatever the Senate, at any given time, wants it to mean,” McConnell said.
He stated that regardless of some bipartisan time-outs, the Senate has evolved into an aggressive setting in the confirmation process.
“For the foreseeable future, I think the confirmation process is going to be viewed by senators as a co-responsibility. In other words, the president gets to initiate, but we’re full partners and in the process,” said the senator from Kentucky.
McConnell said previous standards were that the Senate owed the President deference on nominees, which was based on an assumption that they are qualified for the work. That is no longer the situation, he said.
“The Senate believes it is a co-partner with the president in the business of confirming lifetime appointments,” he said.
