Graham says the quiet part out loud with warning to Dems on future nominations | Courthouse News Service

Ideology, not qualifications, determines judicial appointments - especially to the highest court.  It has always been thus. But with the courts aligned closer to ideology than at any time in the past 150 years Senator Lindsey Graham's candor is a surprising development.  One is not supposed to say out loud that the  advice and consent is conditioned on ideology, not on qualifications. - GWC

Graham says the quiet part out loud with warning to Dems on future nominations | Courthouse News Service

By Kelsey Reichmann

WASHINGTON (CN) — Digging an even deeper partisan hole for the Supreme Court appointment process, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Monday that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have received a hearing if Republicans controlled the Judiciary Committee. 

“I’ll say this: If we get back the Senate, and we’re in charge of this body and there is judicial openings, we will talk to our colleagues on the other side; but if we’re in charge, she would not have been before this committee,” Graham said during Monday’s committee meeting. 

Republicans blocking Democratic nominees is not new. Many of former President Barack Obama’s nominees were blocked — most notably Merrick Garland, who is now the attorney general, when he was nominated to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. With Republicans in the majority at the time, the Senate Judiciary Committee blocked Garland’s nomination on the basis that it was too close to the 2016 presidential election to nominate a new justice. With even less time to spare before the 2020 presidential election, however, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reversed course and fast-tracked the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. 

That Graham would overtly acknowledge his party’s strategy left tongues wagging Monday on Capitol Hill. 

“What’s interesting about Graham’s comments is that I think it’s one of the first times people have sort of said it out loud,” Maya Sen, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said in a phone call. “I think that’s what’s newsworthy about it — not that people didn’t know that this was sort of part of the Republican playbook at this point, to the extent that they could do it, but I think it’s unusual to have people say it out loud.” 

Graham goes on in his comments to say that, instead of Jackson, the country should have a more “moderate” appointee. Experts say Republicans are trying to paint Jackson as an extremist judge, but that portrayal does not match up with her judicial record. As evidence of this, many point to Jackson’s focus on the importance of text and its original meaning — ideas usually associated with more moderate or conservative judges.