Political Quotes

“Mr. President, on another note, I come to the floor to make a few remarks about the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Scalia. It is pretty clear that our colleagues across the aisle do not believe that the American people deserve a voice in the process by which the successor to Justice Scalia is selected. We have made our position pretty clear that there will not be a new Justice confirmed until the American people, in the elections that come up in November, make their preferences known about who will make that appointment. Instead of following the rule book of the minority leader, the senior Senator from New York, and our current Vice President--the ones that they advocated for under a Republican administration--our Democratic friends now argue that a lameduck President should be able to nominate someone to a lifetime appointment to our Nation's highest Court, which will upset the ideological balance on that Court for a generation. As I have mentioned before, the last time a Supreme Court nominee was nominated and confirmed during an election year was 1932, and we have to go back much earlier, to 1888, to find a similar situation in divided government, which we have now. When Vice President Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he made perfectly clear that a Supreme Court nominee should not be considered until after a Presidential election has concluded.…”