The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg previously supported election-year appointments to the Supreme Court when Judge Merrick Garland was nominated in 2016, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
Ginsburg criticized Senate Republicans after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 for refusing to consider Garland, then-President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace him.
"That's their job," she told The New York Times in July of that year. "There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year."
After Republicans successfully blocked Garland’s appointment, Ginsburg declared that they should stick to their policy of waiting during an election if she died before the upcoming one, saying in a statement dictated to a family member: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
The late justice also pushed back on calls to expand the court, telling NPR last year that “nine seems to be a good number, and it’s been that way for a long time.”
She also noted that she is “not at all in favor” of expanding the court, which she called “a temporary solution.”