McConnell: No New Supreme Court Justice Until The NRA Approves Of The Nominee [View all]

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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/03/20/3761908/mcconnell-no-new-supreme-court-justice-until-the-nra-approves-of-the-nominee/

McConnell: No New Supreme Court Justice Until The NRA Approves Of The Nominee

by Ian Millhiser Mar 20, 2016 11:33 am


Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the National Rifle Association, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

McConnell offered this unusual view of the confirmation process during an interview with Fox News Sunday. In response to a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked if Senate Republicans would consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the election if Hillary Clinton prevails, McConnell responded that he “can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association and the National Federation of Independent Businesses.”

The Majority Leader’s statement is significant for several reasons. For one thing, it suggests that his previously stated position that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President,” is a sham. Simply put, it’s unlikely that the NRA or the NFIB will change their position on a nominee just because Hillary Clinton is president and not Barack Obama.

But it’s also worth examining exactly who McConnell would give a veto power over nominees. The NFIB, of course, was a plaintiff in NFIB v. Sebelius, the first Supreme Court case seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That lawsuit called upon the justices to impose limits on federal power that even the late Justice Antonin Scalia refused to impose in previous cases (although it’s worth noting that Scalia abandoned his previous principled stance when given the opportunity to cast a vote against Obamacare). When the NFIB isn’t fighting to take health care away from millions of Americans, it fights equally hard against raising the minimum wage.

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So McConnell isn’t simply delegating his duty to evaluate potential Supreme Court nominees to the NRA, he’s deferring to the NRA despite the fact that the gun lobby group’s case against Garland is very thin. It consists of Garland’s single vote to rehear a case that one of his court’s most conservative members also voted to rehear, along with a decision to allow the FBI to continue to perform audits on the background check system after lawmakers sympathetic to the NRA tried and failed to shut those audits down.