Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden said the Obama administration could have put more pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during the confirmation fight of Judge Merrick Garland, who Mr. Obama nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016.
In an interview with Iowa Starting Line, a politics blog, Mr. Biden also didn’t rule out re-nominating Judge Garland, 66, for the high court, calling him a “first-rate person.”
“I think we should have been a whole heck of a lot harder on [Mr. McConnell],” the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said when asked this week if there was anything he and President Obama should have done differently on the nomination of Judge Garland.
“I have pretty good relationships on both sides of the aisle,” Mr. Biden said in the interview, published Friday. “I’d say, what are you doing, you’re setting a horrible precedent here. And the answer was, I know Joe, but if I go, I’m in a red state, if I go ahead and just call for a hearing, the Koch Brothers will drop five, ten million dollars on my race. That’s nothing about political courage, it’s a reality.”
In March 2016, Mr. Obama nominated Judge Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016.
But Mr. McConnell, invoking the past rationale of people like Mr. Biden, said he wouldn’t consider the nomination in an election year and that the matter should be left up to the voters. The Kentucky Republican also said recently that if a Supreme Court vacancy came up in 2020, he would likely move to fill it.
In June 1992, Mr. Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had warned then-President George H.W. Bush against nominating a new Supreme Court justice if a vacancy opened up before that fall’s presidential election.
In 2016, Mr. Biden said Republicans were taking his past remarks out of context and that he was talking about the dangers of a president nominating an “extreme” candidate without proper Senate consultation.
Mr. Biden said in the new interview that he would be open to nominating Judge Garland, currently the chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for the Supreme Court again, but said he didn’t want to expand the high court itself, as some Democrats have talked about.
Supreme Court Justices receive lifetime appointments, and Judge Garland would be at least 68 years old at the time of a would-be Biden inauguration.
“No, I’m not prepared to go on and try to pack the court, because we’ll live to rue that day,” Mr. Biden said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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