Chuck Grassley: “we just heard some very legitimate questions from the previous speaker that ought to be answered, and I am going to go…”

“we just heard some very legitimate questions from the previous speaker that ought to be answered, and I am going to go back to the familiar to answer that--to the so-called Biden rules. By now everyone is pretty familiar with the Biden rules, so I am not going to take time to go over all of them again, but they boil down to a couple basic points. First, the President should exercise restraint and ``not name a nominee until after the November election is completed,'' or, stated differently, the President should let the people decide. But if the President chooses not to follow this model, but instead, as Chairman Biden said, ``goes the way of Fillmore and Johnson and presses an election-year nomination,'' then the Senate shouldn't consider the nomination and shouldn't hold hearings. It doesn't matter, he said, ``how good a person is nominated by the President.'' So the historical record is pretty clear. But we haven't talked as much about one of the main reasons Chairman Biden was so adamant that the Senate shouldn't consider a Supreme Court nominee during a heated Presidential election. It is because of the tremendous damage such a hyperpolitical environment would cause the Court, the nominee, and the Nation. In short, if the Senate considered a Supreme Court nominee during a heated Presidential election campaign, the Court would become even more political than it already is.…”