WASHINGTON — If a Supreme Court vacancy emerges next year, Mitch McConnell will fill it, the Senate majority leader said Tuesday.
The comment, however, diverges from his decision in 2016 to not consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier that year.
At a chamber luncheon in Paducah, Kentucky, on Tuesday, McConnell was asked by a member of the audience, “Should a Supreme Court justice die next year, what will your position be on filling that spot?”
“I would fill it,” he responded, smirking, which drew loud laughter.
McConnell said that while the 2017 GOP tax cuts could be repealed by future Congresses, judicial confirmations are more permanent.
“What can’t be undone is a lifetime appointment,” McConnell said. “That’s the most important thing that we have done for the country, which cannot be undone.”
The majority leader said earlier that the biggest decision he had made in his Senate career was his choice not to consider Garland’s nomination.
“I made the call in 2016 that we would not fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia in the last year of the previous administration, a decision of enormous consequences,” he said. “You may have recalled the level of controversy that it produced. I thought I was on pretty firm ground because if I knew the shoe had been on the other foot, the guys on the other side would have done the same thing. That provided an opportunity for the American people to speak up about who they wanted to make that decision.”
In a tweet Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called McConnell a hypocrite.
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