No judicial nominee for Obama

It’s a day ending in the letter “y,” so the Herald-Leader must be reflexively parroting Democratic talking points on an issue of national significance.

In this case, that means depriving the American people of their ability, in the middle of an election year, to have a say in who should sit for life on the highest court in the land.

There are numerous reasons, however, to resist this latest left-wing push: First, the voting on who should be our next president has already begun, and voters in over a dozen states — including Kentucky — will be heard in just a few weeks. Let’s allow the process to play out. That means deferring action in the Senate on such a consequential choice until after the voters have spoken, and a new president — Republican or Democrat — has had an opportunity to nominate someone.

Second, the Constitution is clear. The framers wanted the power to appoint new justices to be a shared power, not an entitlement of the president. While the president has the power to nominate someone to the high court, that person cannot be seated without the Senate’s advice and consent.

Third, history provides a clear precedent for the Senate to hit pause during the year of a hotly contested election. The Senate has not filled a Supreme Court vacancy that arose in a presidential election year in over 80 years. And it has been almost 130 years since the Senate confirmed a nomination in such circumstances when the president and the Senate majority were of different political parties.

Indeed, it’s quite something to listen to Democrats clamor for immediate confirmation when it flies in the face of the standard they themselves proposed: Faced with a similar prospect in 2007, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer — then a member of the Senate Democratic Leadership, and today the party’s leader-in-waiting — argued for an even more expansive proposition. He declared that with 18 months remaining in President George W. Bush’s final term that he would urge his majority party to block any Supreme Court nominees that Bush put forward.

I don’t recall the Herald-Leader decrying Schumer’s call back then. I’m sure it was an oversight.

One can only laugh at the new position of Democrats who insist the Senate rush to confirmation. Schumer has been a true innovator when it comes to blocking judicial nominees, including trying to filibuster President Bush’s last Supreme Court nominee, Justice Samuel Alito. And Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid upended decades of precedent when he broke Senate rules in 2013 to ram judicial nominees through the Senate.

By making the opposite case now, it is the Democrats’ naked partisanship showing, not Republicans’. The only thing more comical is this newspaper’s predictably biased editorials. It’s the Herald-Leader that should be embarrassed.

This story was originally published February 19, 2016 at 8:36 PM with the headline "No judicial nominee for Obama."