AURORA | President Barack Obama’s nomination of a judge to take the late Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court only provided state politicians the opportunity to double down on their previously stated opinions.
At issue is whether the U.S. Senate should even entertain hearings for D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Merrick Garland, who was named by President Obama on March 15. Multiple current Republican congressmen and GOP candidates across Colorado have joined together in recent weeks to say that any action on filling the vacancy on the high court’s bench should wait until the next president is in office.
Former state Rep. Jon Keyser, among more than a dozen candidates for U.S. Senate in 2016, went as far as to say “it’s despicable that President Obama … used the death of Justice Scalia as a partisan political opportunity” before calling on Democratic U.S. Sen. Bennet to join the chorus of GOP senators who want “to have our next president nominate Justice Scalia’s replacement to the Supreme Court.”
Most Colorado Democrats have roundly rejected that call, lambasting Republicans for their insistence that the Senate refuse to consider Garland’s nomination.
“There is no question that Chief Judge Merrick Garland deserves a hearing as the President’s Supreme Court nominee,” said Colorado Democratic Party communications advisor Andrew Zucker in a statement. “He has already been confirmed by the Senate before, and received praise from conservative Republicans as a ‘consensus nominee,’ but virtually all of Colorado’s 13 Republican Senate candidates support Republicans in Washington refusing to do their jobs and even considering Judge Garland, as the constitution lays out.”
Zucker pointed to an OnSight/Keating Research poll of Colorado voters taken Feb. 26 to 29 that found 52 percent of respondents — including 59 percent of independents — believed the vacancy should be filled before the presidential election in November. About 67 percent of Republicans polled said they think filling the vacancy should wait until after the next president takes office.
As for Colorado’s two sitting U.S. senators, the debate is just as divided.
Republican Sen. Cory Gardner invoked the so-called “Biden Rule” in a March 16 statement, noting that election-year nominations should wait.
“Our next election is too soon and the stakes are too high,” Gardner said in the statement. “The American people deserve a role in this process as the new Supreme Court justice will influence the direction of this country for years to come.”
But Sen. Bennet pointed to the language of the U.S. Constitution in declaring that he and his fellow senators had an obligation to consider the nomination of Garland.
“This is no time to edit or ‘redline’ the Constitution in favor of some new so-called ‘standard practice,’” Bennet shared in a March 17 statement. “Senators should meet with Judge Garland as I plan to do, and the Senate should hold hearings and an up-or-down vote on his nomination.”