It’s of Senator Orrin Hatch, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, on the Newshour trying to justify his party’s attempt to run out the clock on Obama’s second term. (Start at the 4:50 mark.)
Here are the various excuses:
- We’re in an election year: “Let’s get it out of this terrible presidential brouhaha that is going on.”
- The 80-year precedent fiction: “Usually, you never nominate anyone during the last year of a president.”
- It could result in a big defeat for the GOP: “One side or the other is going to get very, very upset about it.”
- We’re in an election year: “They are already voting in the primaries. We’re already in full swing in the presidential election, at least the primaries. It’s contentious as can be. It’s the most obnoxious political system.”
- Did we mention it’s an election year?: “I think if you are not going to allow it to come up in this brouhaha year, where there’s all kinds of infighting and screaming and shouting, yes, I don’t think any reason—there wouldn’t be any real good reason to have hearings.”
- Antonin Scalia is dead: “Well, we’re talking about Nino Scalia. We’re talking about his successor.”
- The Democrats sank Robert Bork’s nomination, which, it should be noted, did not occur in an election year: “And we’re talking about having a system that doesn’t become the brutalized system that occurred in the Bob Bork nomination, one of the greatest legal minds in the history of this country, and they just brutalized him.”
- The Democrats hammered Clarence Thomas, who was confirmed not in an election year: “And then look at what they did to Clarence Thomas.”
- Just way too much brouhaha: “The fact of the matter is, I would like to get it out of that type of brouhaha, and get it into the next year, where there should be no brouhaha.”
- It would politicize the court: “I just don’t want the court politicized. And this would be the biggest politicization the court in history.”