I knew this would happen:
When McConnell refused to hold hearings or a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016, he offered an excuse I knew would come back to bite him, and now it is.
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His claim at the time was that, with an election looming, it wouldn’t be right to hold a vote on an Obama nominee before the people had the chance to weigh in and vote on who should make the nomination. That was transparent nonsense for some obvious reasons.
When Obama was re-elected in 2012, he was re-elected to a full four-year term, which meant that if a vacancy occurred during any of those four years, it would be Obama’s job to offer a nominee. Letting the seat stay vacant for the better part of the year so the next president could fill it was never contemplated by the founders.
The “election year” excuse was blatant garbage.
It was also completely unnecessary. Obama’s job was to offer a nominee and he did. The Senate’s job was to offer advice and consent, or refuse to offer consent if it didn’t approve of the nominee. There would have been nothing whatsoever wrong with McConnell saying, on behalf of Senate Republicans, they were not going to give Garland a vote because allowing the court majority to tip to the left would simply be too damaging to the country.
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Said who? Said the duly elected majority of the United States Senate, that’s who? That’s the only people who need to.
Some said it was unfair to not at least hold hearings and a vote. It probably was unfair. Garland was a qualified nominee and did nothing wrong in the process. He deserved a vote.
Was the "election year" excuse for not confirming Merrick Garland a mistake?
But McConnell was right not to give him one, because giving Garland a vote risked the possibility that renegade Republicans like John McCain, Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski might peel off and vote to confirm him. And Garland getting confirmed would have done so much damage to the direction of the American judiciary, the damage to the country simply couldn’t be risked – even if it was completely unfair to the man on a personal level.
There is no reason McConnell couldn’t have said all this instead of pretending it was about the election year. Anyone should have known that if McConnell was still majority leader in 2020 and Trump had a chance to make another nomination, it would suddenly not matter that it was an election year. Because that had never really mattered at all. Now he’s admitting it, but anyone who thought about it for two seconds already knew that.
