McConnell: No lame duck confirmation

McConnell was trying to make the election less about Donald Trump and focus it on electing Republicans who will not allow the next president to nominate a liberal Supreme Court justice., but Majority Leader McConnell's strategy has already backfired as President Obama nominated a candidate that would be acceptable to most Senate Republicans.

"I can't imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm in a lame-duck session", he added in remarks to Fox News.

"This nomination ought to be considered by the next president", McConnell said on "Fox News Sunday" as he reaffirmed his stance that Garland should not be considered by the Senate before the election.

The GOP hardliners' major theme is that the vacant seat should be filled by the next president, to be chosen in November, so the American people will have been given a voice and a choice in the Supreme Court seating arrangements. Judge Kennedy, like all judges since who have been nominated to the Supreme Court by other Presidents, received a hearing and an up or down vote.

But on Meet the Press, Todd presented Reid with a clip from 2005, in which Reid said, "Nowhere in that document (the Constitution) does it say the Senate has a duty to give presidential nominees a vote".

Republicans have said they want the next president to make the selection, hoping their party wins November's election.

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Referring to the Alito filibuster, Jentleson said, "No lay person could possibly consider this to be on the same planet as what Republicans are doing to Garland". Garland "would not have been my nominee", Sanders said, even though he would support him.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada called on Republicans to "man up and do it now" in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press".

Estrada explained that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell 's strategy made sense prior to the nomination in order to force President Obama to nominate a candidate acceptable for the GOP. "But I think eventually we're going to have to say yes or no within a reasonable amount of time".

And in this scenario, Republicans might end up with only downsides: they might end up sustaining a lot of political damage by refusing to act on Obama's nominee at all, and they'd end up squandering the chance to get a more centrist justice, rather than a more liberal one. "We will stand by him from now until he's confirmed and he's sitting on the Supreme Court".

Since we have no Republicans representing this state in Congress, we're at least glad to see that New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte is one of several GOP senators who plan to meet with Garland in the coming weeks. As President Obama said Wednesday when announcing his nominee, the Supreme Court is "supposed to be above politics". I've appointed over 100 judges in Ohio, including a woman that, fortunately, I was able to appoint to the Ohio Supreme Court. Then they go before a vote in the committee and a vote in the Senate.