Monday, February 22, 2016

Grassley Shows Why Republicans Have It Coming To Them

Advise & Consent: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley immediately undercut the Senate Republican leader’s pledge not to let President Obama pick Justice Scalia’s successor. No wonder GOP voters are mad.
In “The Art of War,” Machiavelli advised leaders in battle to “endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy.” But in the all-out war shaping up between the two parties on filling the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death on Saturday of Reagan appointee Justice Antonin Scalia, Democrats apparently don’t have to bother dividing the enemy; Republicans are dividing themselves.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s out-of-the-gate declaration that it would be the next president, elected this November, who gets to choose the next Supreme Court justice, a pick upon which the philosophical balance of the court will be tipped, was smart and simple. Why on earth would one of his fellow Republican senators want to muddy the waters?
Yet along comes the chief of the panel that holds hearings on judicial nominations, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, up for re-election this year, who tells reporters Tuesday morning, “I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decisions … in other words, take it a step at a time.”
It is true that Grassley also said Scalia’s seat should be “filled by either Hillary Clinton, Sen. Sanders or whoever’s nominated by the Republicans,” i.e. whoever the next president is. But what made headlines wasn’t that, but Grassley’s refusal to agree categorically with McConnell that any Obama nomination would be dead on arrival.
Read the rest of this IBD editorial HERE and follow a link to a related story below:

GOP gets squishy: May allow vote on Scalia replacement

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