Obama’s confidence higher over Supreme Court pick

With senators returning to Washington this week from a two-week recess, the White House is expressing growing optimism it can break a Republican blockade of a Senate confirmation hearing for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Mr. Obama will try to raise the public pressure on the GOP on Thursday when he travels to the University of Chicago Law School, where he once taught, to make a pitch for the 63-year-old nominee, currently the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

On Monday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, will hold a nationwide call with progressive activists to marshal more grass-roots support for the Garland nomination.

And on Tuesday, two more Republicans, Sens. Susan M. Collins of Maine and John Boozman of Arkansas, have agreed to meet with the nominee. They bring to at least 16 the number of GOP senators who have at least talked directly with Judge Garland, despite the refusal of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa to schedule a committee confirmation hearing.

“We think that we’re making progress on this, and we think we have a really good chance,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston told reporters Friday.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, asserted that Republican senators “are beginning to change” partly due to incumbents’ fear of the wrath of independent voters in critical swing states.

“Leader McConnell and Chairman Grassley are trying to drive Republicans off a cliff,” he told reporters. “But fewer and fewer of them are willing to go along for the ride.”

The pro-Obama Constitutional Responsibility Project on Friday detailed the lobbying effort to get the judge a hearing and a vote, claiming that it has collected 1.5 million signatures for the #DoYourJob petition being sent to lawmakers, including 42,000 directly to Mr. Grassley.

But Senate Republican leaders insist their majority is holding firm to the position that voters should have the critical say in filling the Supreme Court vacancy by electing a new president in November. They say the idea of growing momentum for the Garland nomination is wishful thinking.

“A month and a half ago, there were three GOP senators open to hearings and a vote,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart. “Now, after a massive campaign by the White House, moveon.org, unions, and other liberal special-interest groups, not to mention millions of dollars in special-interest ad spending, there are two GOP senators calling for hearings. The poll numbers haven’t moved, no Republican senators have changed their principled positions — and every liberal special-interest group involved in the project must be starting to wonder about the wisdom of spending all that money for zero change.”

In recent days, Ms. Collins and fellow Republican Sens. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Jerry Moran of Kansas have said they favor holding hearings. Mr. Stewart said that Mr. Moran subsequently noted that GOP leaders have ruled out a hearing.

Five Democratic House lawmakers from Illinois called on Mr. Kirk to back up his support for a hearing, saying his comments mean nothing unless he’s willing to take on Mr. McConnell.

“As far as I’m concerned, this is just theater,” said Rep. Robin Kelly. “Because Senator Kirk is running for office, he decided to be one of the actors. If he weren’t running for office, he probably wouldn’t have had the meeting [with Judge Garland], so it really calls into question his sincerity. This is just one of the things in a long line of disrespect that the president has been shown by the Republican Party.”

’Monumental chutzpah’

Conservative activists say the White House is bluffing with phony optimism about the prospects for a confirmation hearing.

“For President Obama, the first president to have voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee, to claim he is not playing politics with the court takes monumental chutzpah,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network. “No amount of spin or gimmicks is going to change this. The White House’s attempt to manufacture Republican disunity is engaging in wishful thinking and confusing courtesy with weakness.”

The head of the conservative group FreedomWorks warned that Republican senators who agree to meet with Judge Garland are risking their careers.

“When Republican senators meet with President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, they are playing right into the hands of the White House and advancing President Obama’s goal of getting a hearing,” said FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon. “With a few exceptions, Senate Republicans came out strongly against the idea of an election-year confirmation to the Supreme Court. Most took it a step further by saying that they didn’t see the point of even meeting with a nominee. Now, some are changing their tune. By foolishly agreeing to meet with Obama’s nominee, Republicans are playing with fire, and they can’t blame the conservative grass roots when they get burned.”

Progressives point out that polls are consistently show that a majority of voters favor the Senate holding confirmation hearings for Judge Garland. Moreover, 73 percent of respondents in a CBS/New York Times poll and 77 percent in a recent Monmouth University poll said the GOP is playing politics by blocking a hearing.

Democrats said those findings spell trouble for Republican incumbents in swing states such as Mr. Kirk, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. Pollster Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research, joined Mr. Schumer in a conference call Friday to review polling data. He said Republican incumbents running for re-election in battleground states “are defending an untenable position and are putting themselves in very substantial vulnerability” by refusing to hold hearings on Judge Garland.

“When they return to Washington from recess, they are going to return as a group of people who will be well aware that they are very much on the wrong side of public opinion,” Mr. Garin said.

Democrats also noted that Mr. Obama’s job-approval rating reached 53 percent last week in Gallup’s daily tracking poll, the highest it has been in the poll in more than three years. They attribute it in part to voters siding with the president on the Supreme Court issue.

During the event at the University of Chicago, Mr. Obama will discuss “his fulfilling his constitutional responsibility and why the Senate needs to do its job as well,” senior adviser Brian Deese said.

Liberal groups are planning events this week to pressure Republican senators in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa and Illinois.