Posted on 10/07/2020 2:26:30 PM PDT by knighthawk
Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” despite taking issue with the timing of the confirmation process for Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) acknowledged the pick was “qualified as a judge” for the nomination.
“We should not be racing ahead with this partisan process,” Coon declared. “There is no precedent in our nation’s history for the Senate holding a confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court nominee this close, just 27 days, before a presidential election where people are already voting in more than half the states.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
I like ACB even more.
“...There is no There is no precedent in our nation’s history for the Senate holding a confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court nominee this close, just 27 days, before a presidential election in our nation’s history for the Senate holding a confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court nominee this close, just 27 days, before a presidential election...”
Does there have to be a “precedent” before you do anything in the Senate????
Of course not..............
Well, if she’s qualified, confirm her.. today.
A-hole doesn’t know his own job description nor the President’s discretion.
The Senator essentially says, it does not matter if she is qualified. What matters is whether she will vote the way I want or not! (Judicial philosophy)
I wonder how long she was "on machines" before they pulled the plug.
She’d better not vacation at Cibolo Creek Ranch, TX.
This bozo does not know his history. I read earlier today that one Supreme Court justice was confirmed AFTER the election. Do not remember the details.
Coons has a damaged logic and reasoning center in his apparently small brain.
OH NO Mr. Bill
”Attacking ACB will be politically costly. We must attack the nomination and confirmation process instead.”
I think 3 Justices were confirmed by a lame duck Senate after the president had lost a reelection bid. But none since before 1900.
Partisan Media Shills update.
Someone has not read their history books or is flat out lying.
There are 27 precedents. Some as late as the incumbent sending in his SCOTUS nomination AFTER the election, before the new president was sworn in.
Coons, a/k/a the Delaware Cueball, won his Senate seat after waging a campaign in which he and his supporters insinuated that an wonderful Catholic woman, Christine O’Donnell, was a witch.
He is a complete and unmitigated piece of dung.
He’s technically correct about HEARINGS, but only because of the timing of previous vacancies, not because it was thought to be improper.
National Review:
“Nineteen times between 1796 and 1968, presidents have sought to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential-election year while their party controlled the Senate. Ten of those nominations came before the election; nine of the ten were successful, the only failure being the bipartisan filibuster of the ethically challenged Abe Fortas as chief justice in 1968. Justices to enter the Court under these circumstances included such legal luminaries as Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo. George Washington made two nominations in 1796, one of them a chief justice replacing a failed nominee the prior year. It was his last year in office, and the Adams–Jefferson race to replace him was bitter and divisive. Woodrow Wilson made two nominations in 1916, one of them to replace Charles Evans Hughes, who had resigned from the Court to run for president against Wilson. Wilson was in a tight reelection campaign that was not decided until California finished counting votes a week after Election Day. Three of the presidents who got election-year nominees confirmed (Benjamin Harrison in 1892, William Howard Taft in 1912, and Herbert Hoover in 1932) were on their way to losing reelection, in Taft’s and Hoover’s cases by overwhelming margins. But they still had the Senate, so they got their nominees through.
Nine times, presidents have made nominations after the election in a lame-duck session. These include some storied nominations, such as John Adams picking Chief Justice John Marshall in 1801 and Abraham Lincoln selecting Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase in 1864. Of the nine, the only one that did not succeed was Washington’s 1793 nomination of William Paterson, which was withdrawn for technical reasons and resubmitted and confirmed the first day of the next Congress (Paterson had helped draft the Judiciary Act of 1789 creating the Court, and the Constitution thus required his term as a senator to end before he could be appointed to the Court). Two of Andrew Jackson’s nominees on the last day of his term were confirmed a few days later, without quibbles. In no case did the Senate reject a nominee or refuse to act on a nomination; why would they? Three of the presidents who filled lame-duck vacancies — Adams, Martin Van Buren, and Benjamin Harrison — had already lost reelection.
Also from Dan McLaughlin
Lawfare and The Atlantic’s Weak Case for Court-Packing
The Adams precedent is the most famous; back when people read basic American history in school, everybody knew about Adams and the Federalists in the Senate stocking the courts with “midnight judges.” That is part of the story of the first peaceful transfer of power after a democratic election in history. The crown jewel of the midnight judges, Chief Justice Marshall, went on to become the most influential jurist in American history, entrenching the Federalist Party’s theories of the Constitution for many years after the party ceased to exist. Marshall served into Andrew Jackson’s presidency over three decades later, and his decisions still guide the American constitutional practice of judicial review.
In addition to Marshall, two of the other lame-duck appointees would go on to lead the Court: Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, was appointed Chief Justice by Lincoln a month after the 1864 election, and Harlan Fiske Stone, appointed by Calvin Coolidge in January after the 1924 election, would later be elevated by Franklin Roosevelt to Chief Justice in 1941. Lincoln was the only president with a favorable Senate to have a vacancy open just before the election (in mid-October, with the death of Dred Scott author and Lincoln bête noire Roger Taney) and wait until he had won to make a nomination. He had his own strategic reasons to want his own position fortified before using the plum position of Chief Justice to rid himself of Chase, who had angled for Lincoln’s job in 1864 and was trusted by Lincoln ideologically but not politically.
A few of these late-term nominations — but only a few — were made with an eye to political concession. Hoover required two tries to fill a vacancy with a Republican in 1930. When Oliver Wendell Holmes retired in 1932, Hoover was mired in the Depression and fighting for his political life. He chose a Democrat: the liberal, Jewish New Yorker Cardozo, then the most prominent state-court judge in the country and widely seen as a worthy successor to Holmes’s legacy as a common-law judge. Benjamin Harrison, having filled one seat in July 1892 with Republican George Shiras, picked Democrat Howell Jackson for his second choice in the lame-duck session in January 1893. Jackson was not just any Democrat: like his predecessor, Lucius Q. C. Lamar, Jackson had served in the government of the Confederacy. He was also a Harrison family friend. These were, however, political choices; the other 17 vacancies were filled by men from the party holding the presidency and the Senate.
The bottom line: If a president and the Senate agree on a Supreme Court nominee, timing has never stopped them. By tradition, only when the voters have elected a president and a Senate majority from different parties has the fact of a looming presidential election mattered. When there is no dispute between the branches, there is no need to ask the voters to resolve one.”
How about the precedent for running dementia candidates?
That doesn’t address the timing of HEARINGS.
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