GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski refuses to back Trump's nominee replacing legendary RBG, says polls too close
With the pre-election scenario heating up over the succession of late Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Republican camp witnessed something that made it less comfortable. Veteran Senator Lisa Murkowski has said that she will not back President Donald Trump’s nominee replacing the liberal icon, pointing out to the precedent that the GOP itself had set up ahead of the 2016 presidential election when Justice Antonin Scalia died. The red party opposed the idea of a replacement taking over with that year’s election less than a year away. The apex court went with eight judges till 2017 when Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch while Merrick Garland, the choice of his predecessor Barack Obama, did not get a hearing.
This time, however, the GOP leadership is following a different trajectory. While Trump has said that he will put forward his pick next week and it will be a woman under all likelihood, Senate Majority Leader Mitchell McConnell vowed to move ahead quickly with the president’s nominee on the Supreme Court, drawing the opponents’ ire. The Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton who had appointed Ginsburg in 1993, accused the Kentucky senator of hypocrisy for it was him who opposed Scalia’s replacement ahead of the 2016 presidential election. They have also threatened to pack the apex court with more justices of their choice if they do well in the presidential and Senate elections this November.
Murkowski, the 63-year-old senator from Alaska who has been serving office since 2002, has echoed the Democrats’ thinking by refusing to support Trump’s nomination for Ginsburg’s replacement before the Election Day which is on November 3. She is in fact the second GOP senator after Maine’s Susan Collins to announce her opposition to filling up the SC judge’s post before the election. On Saturday, September 19, Collins, who is set for a tough re-election battle, said she would support the Senate reviewing Trump’s nominee but was not convinced that voting should take place only after the election. “The decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd,” she said.
'My position has not changed'
On Sunday, September 20, Murkowski said in a statement: “For weeks, I have stated that I would not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election. Sadly, what was then a hypothetical is now our reality, but my position has not changed.” She added: “I did not support taking up a nomination eight months before the 2016 election to fill the vacancy created by the passing of Justice Scalia. We are now even closer to the 2020 election — less than two months out — and I believe the same standard must apply.”
Two more GOP senators have to agree with Murkowski and Collins in order to give the Democrats a strength of 51 votes in the 100-member Senate to block the nomination to go through. It is not the first time, however, that Sen Murkowski’s role in the voting for nominees to the SC has made the headlines. In 2018, when the Senate cast votes on the controversial Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the apex court as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy, Murkowski came up with something unusual. She defected from her party and voted “present” instead of either a “yes” or “no”. Kavanaugh got the appointment following a close 50-48 win. In 2017, however, she backed Gorsuch’s nomination as the replacement for Scalia. Also in February, while Murkowski said that she could not vote to convict Trump in the Senate impeachment trial, she said the president's actions in office were "shameful and wrong".