Sen. Chris Coons said Tuesday the battle over replacing late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a chance to reverse the steady creep of partisan acrimony in the august chamber, one day after Republicans made the man he replaced — Vice President Joseph P. Biden — an unwitting guide for how the Senate should approach nominations in a pivotal election year.
Mr. Coons, Delaware Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee, urged Republicans who control the chamber to sweep aside verbal tit-for-tat and give President Obama’s eventual nominee a fair hearing instead of waiting for a new president, saying the GOP wouldn’t want to risk the progress they’ve made in opening up the chamber to free-wheeling debate.
He also pressed Mr. Obama to nominate a balanced, centrist nominee who both parties can rally behind, saying it would be misguided to push for a liberal firebrand who serves as a mirror image of Scalia, the outspoken conservative.
“I don’t think this moment calls for that,” Mr. Coons said.
Even as Mr. Coons made his pitch to reporters, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell trumpeted a 1992 speech in which then-Sen. Biden of Delaware said it was “not fair” to let a lame-duck president make the weighty decision of appointing a new justice.
Mr. Biden said once the “political season” had started, President George H.W. Bush should back down and wait until after the election. In fact, he said Mr. Bush shouldn’t even bother to nominate anyone, much less have the Senate approve the pick — exactly the stance Republicans are now taking toward Mr. Obama.
“Whatever [Mr. Obama] decides, his own vice president and others remind us of an essential point: presidents have a right to nominate, just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent,” Mr. McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said Tuesday. “In this case, the Senate will withhold it.”
Mr. Coons said that critics are “wildly over-reading” Mr. Biden’s lengthy speech, saying the then-senator left the door open to a compromise nominee who would be moderate enough to win his support.
He also said Mr. Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, confirmed a series of circuit and district judges all the way up to September in an election year, so his actions should speak louder than his words that day.
“Regardless of the debate over what was said, I point towards what he did,” said Mr. Coons, who was elected in 2010 to succeed Ted Kaufman, the caretaker senator who held the Delaware seat after Mr. Biden rose with Mr. Obama in 2008.
Mr. Coons said he thinks there are plenty of Senate Republicans who want to hold hearings on Mr. Obama’s eventual nominee — even beyond Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Susan Collins of Maine, who have said as much.
He also challenged Mr. McConnell to stick by his promise to open up the Senate floor.
The Kentuckian frequently boasts of the chamber’s bipartisan achievements under his leadership, including a long-overdue overhaul of the Medicare payment system and rewrite of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind education law.
Mr. Coons said Mr. McConnell “puts at real risk his earned record of showing that the Senate can work by insisting, almost immediately after the news of Justice Scalia’s passing, that the Republican majority would refuse to consider any nominee by President Obama.”
“That strikes me as the sort of strident obstructionism that is unfortunate, that is divisive and that the average American is looking to reject,” he said.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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