Editor,
Gordon Weil’s column “A lesson on picking Supreme Court justices” is very insightful and his conclusions have merit. In other words, I agree with him.
However, I wish that he had mentioned Senator McConnell’s justification for blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination: “The Biden Rule.”
When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the SCOTUS vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, Senator McConnell invoked the “Biden Rule,” named for its inventor – then-senator Joe Biden in 1992 – which argued that then-President GHW Bush should wait until after the upcoming 1992 election to appoint a nominee. After all, they reasoned, it wouldn’t be fair to the voters to fill such an important vacancy so close to a national election.
As McConnell stated in a March 16, 2016 speech on the floor of the Senate, “The Senate will continue to observe the Biden Rule so that the American people have a voice in this momentous decision on who to name to the court.”
The Democrats never anticipated that their own tactics would be used against them during Obama’s final year in office. Of course, they were so certain that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, they did not fight for the vacant Court seat until after they lost the November election.
Elections have consequences.
Paul Israelson
Biddeford
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