Michael Berry

Michael Berry

Michael Berry has drunk homemade moonshine from North Carolina with Robert Earl Keen, met two presidents with the same last name, been cussed at by...Full Bio

 

Ted Cruz: Why The Senate Must Confirm RBG’s Successor Before The Election

Sen. Ted Cruz says with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump must nominate a successor this week and the Senate must confirm that successor before Election Day.

Sen. Cruz said on ABC’s ‘This Week’:

"If you look at history, if you actually look at what the precedent is, this has happened 29 times. Twenty-nine times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year. Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times. That's what presidents do. If there's a vacancy, they make a nomination.
What has the Senate done? And there's a big difference in the Senate with whether the Senate is of the same party of the president or a different party of the president. When the Senate has been of the same party of the president, and a vacancy occurs in an election year, of the 29 times, those are 19 of them. Of those 19, the Senate has confirmed those nominees 17 times. So if the parties are the same, the Senate confirms the nominee.
When the parties are different, that's happened ten times. Merrick Garland was one of them. Of those ten, the Senate has confirmed the nominees only twice.
And -- and there's a reason for that. It's not just simply your party, my party. The reason is it's -- it's a question of checks and balances. In order for a Supreme Court nomination to go forward, you have to have the president and the Senate -- in this instance, the American people voted. They elected Donald Trump. A big part of the reason they elected Donald Trump is because of the Scalia vacancy, and they wanted principle constitutionalists on the court. And the big part of the reason why we have a Republican majority, elected in 2014, re-elected in 2016, grown even larger in 2018, a major issue in each of those elections is the American people voted and said, we want constitutionalist judges.
And so the president was elected to do this and the Senate was elected to confirm this nomination."

Sen. Cruz further elaborated his point in an op-ed piece for Fox News noting that, “three presidents, who had already lost the presidential election, have filled lame-duck Supreme Court vacancies. When this issue arose in 1992, then-Senator Joe Biden made clear the Senate had the right to proceed. He noted, however, that the Senate should ensure the process is ‘fair’ to the nominee. I believe this Senate can meet the standard of fairness.”

He added that “[T]his nomination is why the American people elected Donald Trump as president and this confirmation is why the American people voted for a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate.”  And that “our nation is at risk of a constitutional crisis without nine justices on the bench” as he head into a contested election."


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