How Republicans Quickly Lined Up to Confirm a Supreme Court Nominee

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   How Republicans Quickly Lined Up to Confirm a Supreme Court Nominee
By Rich Lowry

& John McCormack

September 26, 2020 6:30 AM

The big question is, Can they get it done before Election Day?

W hat’s been most remarkable so far about Republican senators lining up to try to fill the Supreme Court vacancy is the lack of drama. There hasn’t been a key meeting or event, or a fence-sitter who, after a long bout of public agonizing, promised to provide the decisive vote. Instead, the votes needed to move ahead have fallen in place with relative ease.

“It’s funny,” a Republican senator says. “A lot of it came together before we got together to talk about it formally.” By the time Republican senators had returned to Washington and gathered together for the first time since Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death — at a lunch on Tuesday — Mitt Romney had announced he was on board.

A White House aide calls the consolidation “a natural reaction,” both to the poor treatment of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation and the realization that historical precedent strongly favors a Senate majority’s confirming the election-year nominees of presidents of the same party. (The aide cited the widely circulated piece by Dan McLaughlin setting out the history.)

“The historical data made it clear that was what the precedent was,” says the senator. “That made it very easy.”

Another Republican senator puts it this way: “We all believe in putting conservative judges on the Court and we weren’t going to be duped by the Democratic process argument when at root we all know what the Democrats would do it if they had the chance.”

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/how-republicans-quickly-lined-up-to-confirm-a-supreme-court-nominee/