Why won’t McConnell respect Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wishes, CNN reporter @mkraju asks
via @BecketAdams washex.am/3mRJDW7
CNN’s Manu Raju took a break from his usual duties of stalking Republican senators in the Senate office buildings to ask McConnell at a press briefing, “Why not listen to her dying wish, apparently, to allow the next president to make this decision?”
The Kentucky lawmaker responded well, saying, “I prefer another thing she said recently, which was she thought the number on the Supreme Court ought to be nine.”
“There is no fixed number in the Constitution,” the late justice said in 2019. “So, this court has had as few as five, as many as 10. Nine seems to be a good number, and it's been that way for a long time.”
There is more.
In 2016, Ginsburg was asked whether the Senate had a responsibility to assess Judge Merrick Garland's qualifications to sit on the court. She answered in the affirmative.
"That's their job," Ginsburg said. "There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year."
She was also asked that year if an election-year vacancy should be filled by the winning candidate. Ginsburg balked.
“The president is elected for four years, not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four,” she said. “Maybe members of the Senate will wake up and appreciate that that’s how it should be.”
But even if Ginsburg had not argued against court-packing and in favor of the Senate and the president's authority, what sort of nonsense question is this from Raju?
Why isn’t Ginsburg’s “dying wish” being honored? Because that is not how Supreme Court vacancies are filled? Because there is no “dying wish” clause in the U.S. Constitution?
Because Supreme Court justices, alive or dead, don’t get a say in the confirmation process?
Since 1795, nine justices have been nominated and confirmed to the court during a presidential election year, where the same party controlled the executive branch and the Senate. What Ginsburg reportedly dictated to her family is irrelevant. That is not how this works.
You would think that a “senior congressional correspondent” would know all of this. But when it comes to CNN, that is apparently expecting too much.
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