Bill Clinton said President Donald Trump’s aim to nominate a woman this week to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the vacancy of the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg is "superficially hypocritical."
In an interview on CNN’s "State of the Union," the former president, who nominated Ginsburg to the nation’s high court in 1993, blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for flip-flopping from his opposition to Merrick Garland’s nomination by President Barack Obama during the last year of his administration.
"Well, of course it's superficially hypocritical, isn't it?" Clinton said.
"Mitch McConnell wouldn't give President Obama's nominee a hearing 10 months before the president's election. And that meant that we went a long time with eight judges on the court. This is what they do. They vote for Senator McConnell and President Trump."
Clinton added: "When the shoe's on the other foot and he wants to judge, we're fewer than 50 days away and that argument doesn't cut any mustard."
"It's going to further spread cynicism in our system," Clinton said.
According to Clinton, there was a similar situation for President Abraham Lincoln.
"In early October Justice Roger Tony died in 1864," Clinton said. "And President Lincoln wanted to appoint the then-Secretary of the Treasury to the Supreme Court, but he did not do it until after the election. He said it was very close in the election and he shouldn't do it."
Clinton lamented that "I don't know what's happened to make him stop trusting the American people."
"But apparently when it's to his advantage, the people are not entitled to a say. So it is what it is. It's politics. But I think we should remember that," he said.
"You want somebody who can do what Ruth Bader Ginsburg did, get 96% of the [Senate] vote," he said.
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