Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that she would re-nominate any African-American woman whom President Barack Obama sought for the Supreme Court but was denied a hearing by the Republican-controlled Senate if she won the White House.
Cautioning that "I really don't want to second-guess what the president is going to do," the Democratic front-runner
told "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" that "yes," she would back any Obama appointment "if I win the presidency."
"I want to him to nominate whoever he chooses, but we do have a significant number of qualified, ready, prepared African-American women," Clinton said in response to a question by news anchor Roland Martin. "That is a very important consideration — and certainly, if he nominates somebody who he thinks is going to do the job and, hopefully, break the logjam of the Senate, of course I would stick with that person and do everything I could.
"It would be nice to have the entire country represented on the Supreme Court, but I don't want to substitute my judgment for the president."
Clinton said that the Obama administration was "determined not only to fulfill their constitutional responsibility" in nominating a replacement for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, "but to make the pressure on the Senate so enormous that they have to fulfill their constitutional responsibility."