There is precedent in filling the Supreme Court vacancy 2020

The American people deserve a fully-staffed court of nine. The American people expect the president’s nominee to be given a fair hearing and a timely vote in the Senate. You cannot keep a seat on the Supreme Court, which represents all of us, you cannot keep it vacant against the Constitution. The blockade on filling a naturally occurring vacancy, in my view, is harmful to the independence of the Article Three branch. If you want to stop extremism in your party, you can start by showing the American people that you respect the President of the United States and the Constitution. The Constitution is 100% clear. The President of the United States has the right to nominate someone to be a justice of the Supreme Court. Senate’s function is to hold hearings and to vote.

If you don’t believe these words and positions then you don’t agree with Democrats, as those statements above are their words and stance they took in 2016.

If Democrats want to cry foul and “Hypocrisy!!!!” at least consider that it happens on both sides.

Importantly, we should contemplate historical precedent. There have been 29 times there’s been a vacancy during an election year, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out. 19 occurred when the Senate majority was the same as the president. When the president’s party controls the Senate, they get to fill the vacancy. When the president’s party doesn’t control the Senate, the nominee is typically not confirmed. According to National Review Dan McLaughlin, of the 10 times the party of the president and Senate were not aligned, only one nominee was ever confirmed before an election in a year.

So to borrow Joe Biden’s words: let’s “de-escalate.” If we want to de-escalate, we can follow precedent not politics. If Democrats want “everyday fairness” as former President Barack Obama suggests then they shouldn’t threaten to pack the court, end the filibuster, and grant statehood to two states that will likely give them four more Democratic senators.

Obama suggests Republicans should “apply rules with consistency.” I wish that could be the case. Obama knows this as well. He is after all the one who created the “We Can’t Wait” initiative in 2011 to institute policies by executive orders because he couldn’t “wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job.”

For this one, Dan McLaughlin’s article in the National Review article is spot on: History is on the side of Republicans Filling a Supreme Court vacancy in 2020.