It's "total B.S." to compare how Republicans treated former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, with how Democrats are handling President Donald Trump's choice, Neil Gorsuch, Sen. Orrin Hatch said Monday.
"They're politicizing this whole process," the Utah Republican told CNN co-hosts John Berman and Poppy Harlow. "This is a guy who is a mainstream conservative, which they hate, they don't like that. And of course, they are still upset about my other friend, [Obama nominee] Merrick Garland. But the Republicans had every right to delay that within a presidential [election] year."
But when Berman called blocking both Garland and Gorsuch's nominations "a double standard," Hatch fired back.
"I'll just tell you straight up, that's total B.S.," Hatch told him. "I can't go back in time and show you any case where in a presidential election year they allowed a Supreme Court justice to be nominated unless both sides agreed. And both sides didn't agree."
Further, said Hatch, "it was every right of [Majority Leader Mitch McConnell] and Senate Republicans to say we're not going to do this in a presidential year."
It did, at that time, look as if Hillary Clinton was a "sure winner," so lawmakers feared getting "an even more liberal judge" had Garland been confirmed, Hatch said, so his name never went through.
"That's what democracy says," said Hatch. "You can hold a vote or you don't have to hold a vote. I was willing to go ahead with it but to make a long story short, the Republicans acted fully and wholly within the rules and I think did so properly."
But instead of Clinton, "it just so happens that Trump won, and this really outstanding man named Gorsuch has been the nominee," said Hatch. "You'd have to look long and hard to find a better nominee for this court than Neil Gorsuch, and frankly, if you look at his record, it's across the board, yes, he's conservative, but he voted 99 percent of the time with the other judges on what really was a liberal dominated court.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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