Reagan already set the precedent for President Obama’s late-term Supreme Court nomination

[Crabtownboy]

Republicans love to call out Reagan as reason to support a particular idea or stance. Why do they not do so with the current Supreme Court situation.

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion...upreme-court-vacancy-in-his-final-year/23826/

Republican leaders across the board are demanding that President Obama leave the sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court empty and instead wait a year to allow the next President to pick a nominee instead. Republican candidate Marco Rubio went so far as to make the claim that it’s been eighty years since a President picked a Supreme Court justice on his way out the door. But history instead tells us that Rubio’s hero Ronald Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy with just over a year left in office, and he faced none of this backlash.

Reagan picked Anthony Kennedy at the end of 1987, right around a year before his Presidency was set to end. No democrats in the Senate suggested that Reagan should leave the seat open for the next President to fill. In fact, after the customary two month-plus confirmation hearing, Kennedy was unanimously approved by 97-0 vote. In other words, not a single democrat in the Senate tried to block Reagan’s nominee. So the current republican scrutiny aimed at Obama is hypocritical and goes against precedent. However there is one caveat Obama should note.

 

[Revmitchell]

Kennedy's 1988 confirmation isn't a perfect precedent. As Ed Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues, that seat on the court had been vacated much earlier — in the summer of 1987. His nomination was delayed into President Ronald Reagan's last year in office only because Reagan had to withdraw the nomination of Robert Bork.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...dies-in-an-election-year-nobody-really-knows/

 

[Revmitchell]

Yet another dishonest op.

 

[Zaac]

Yet another dishonest op.

Another dishonest retort. Doesn't matter when it was vacated. It sets the exception to the very "tradition" the GOP is arguing as their reason for not wanting Obama to name a nominee.

Wow. The GOP is just as hypocritical as is the Dems. Who would have thunk it?

 

[Crabtownboy]

Yet another dishonest op.

Only your opinion again. No discussion. No intelligent reply. Just blowing air as you have nothing of substance to say.

Prove you point or please stop ignorant replies. Thanks and God bless.

 

[Crabtownboy]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...dies-in-an-election-year-nobody-really-knows/

The article you cite proves the Republicans wrong and hypocritical. Thanks, I appreciate your doing this.

From Rev's cited article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...dies-in-an-election-year-nobody-really-knows/

During the Republican debate Saturday evening, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said, "We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year.

That's not quite true: Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year. But the situation rarely comes up. A seat has opened on the Supreme Court during an election year only once every few decades.

 

[Revmitchell]

That's not quite true: Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year. But the situation rarely comes up. A seat has opened on the Supreme Court during an election year only once every few decades.

Once again this is misleading and dishonest. His confirmation carried over and began much earlier with the Bork hearings. Not the same thing.

 

[Alcott]

Boy, both Obama and Biden set a 'precedent' about court nominations. Can you tell us what they were now, like a good little boy?

 

[TCassidy]

And then Senator Obama signed on to the filibuster team toward the end of the Bush administration. Ho hum. Politics as usual.