Tim Kaine is having a tough time telling the truth. After being taken to task for his “Dishonorable Distortion” of Judge Neil Gorsuch’s record, he’s now being called out for his flip-flop on Supreme Court nominees.
During his failed Vice Presidential bid last year, Kaine vowed to change the Senate rules if Republicans attempted to filibuster Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominee. Well now he’s back in the Senate, vowing to block a vote on Judge Neil Gorsuch, and he swears that if Democrats had won in 2016 and 41 Republicans objected to their nominee, his administration would have certainly changed their nominee.
Ok, Tim…whatever you say.
Tim Kaine’s Filibuster Flip-Flop
The Weekly Standard
April 4, 2017
http://www.weeklystandard.com/tim-kaines-filibuster-flip-flop/article/2007510
Less than two weeks before the 2016 elections, Virginia senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said that he would support eliminating the 60-vote hurdle to confirm Supreme Court nominees in order to get Judge Merrick Garland on the court.
“I was in the Senate when the Republicans’ stonewalling around appointments caused Senate Democratic majority to switch the vote threshold on appointments from 60 to 51. And we did it on everything but a Supreme Court justice,” Kaine told the Huffington Post on October 28, 2016. “If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies, then a Democratic Senate majority will say, ‘We’re not going to let you thwart the law,’ and so we will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
But now that the Democratic minority is filibustering Judge Neil Gorsuch and demanding a new, more liberal Supreme Court nominee, Kaine told THE WEEKLY STANDARD Monday night that if Democrats had won the 2016 elections they would’ve let a GOP minority keep Garland off the Supreme Court:
Kaine: If they gave us a vote and they voted somebody down, we would have put somebody else up. But if they had stonewalled and … refused to meet with somebody–
TWS: So if 41 Republicans said “no” to Judge Garland, you would’ve picked a different [Supreme Court] nominee?
Kaine: Yeah. Well, the president would have.
The Virginia senator added that he thought that Republicans “violated what the Constitution requires by not having hearings or votes [for Garland]. Judge Gorsuch is going to get the vote. He’s going to have the whole advise-and-consent process. The question is can he reach the 60-vote threshold.”
Given the public comments of Kaine and other Senate Democrats before the election, it’s hard to imagine that victorious Democrats actually would have let 41 Republicans reject a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. “They mess with the Supreme Court, [the filibuster will] be changed just like that,” outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid said, snapping his fingers, according to a report published at Talking Points Memo in October.
Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Democratic leader, never publicly objected to getting rid of the 60-vote hurdle for Supreme Court nominees before the election, but he now claims Democrats always wanted to keep it. “We have no intention of getting rid of the 60-vote hurdle. We didn’t then. We didn’t now,” Schumer told TWS the day Gorsuch was nominated.
Throughout U.S. history, a partisan filibuster has never been used to keep a Supreme Court nominee off the court. As William Kristol wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “Republican senators have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and they have an obligation to confirm Supreme Court justices who would do the same. If they fail to exercise their constitutional authority to confirm Gorsuch out of deference to a Senate rule that has never been used to block a qualified Supreme Court nominee—a rule that we know Democrats would eliminate if the tables were turned—they will make Chuck Schumer happier. But they will have failed the country and the Constitution.”