Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote to President Donald Trump on Tuesday and urged him to nominate Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Garland, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Senate Republicans, however, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), refused to allow confirmation hearings for Garland, citing a “rule” invented by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) in 1992 under which the Senate would refuse to confirm new Supreme Court appointments in a presidential election year.
When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s former seat. Democrats have since described the seat as “stolen.”
The Washington Post reported Thursday:
Schumer privately urged the president in a phone call earlier this week to nominate federal judge Merrick B. Garland, who was Obama’s third nominee to the Supreme Court and was summarily shunned by Senate Republicans in 2016.
Trump called Schumer on Tuesday afternoon for a Supreme Court-centered conversation that lasted less than five minutes, according to a person familiar with the call. Schumer, the person said, pressed the president to name Garland to succeed Kennedy, arguing that doing so would help unite the country.
Schumer also warned the president that nominating a jurist who would be hostile to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a woman’s right to an abortion, and to Obama’s health-care law would be “cataclysmic” and damage Trump’s legacy, added the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.
Given that it is highly unlikely that Trump would nominate Garland — or that Democrats would give him credit if he did — it seems likely that Schumer’s motives were largely to appeal to his party’s political base by being seen to do everything possible to stop the nomination of a conservative Supreme Court justice.
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