If a Supreme Court vacancy emerges next year, Mitch McConnell will fill it, the Senate majority leader said. The comment diverges from his decision to not consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination after the sudden death of Justice Scalia.
Shortly after Obama nominated Garland in March 2016, McConnell said on the Senate floor,"The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration. The next president may also nominate someone very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy.”
Asked for a comment Tuesday night, McConnell spokesman David Popp referred NBC News to an interview the majority leader did with Fox News in October 2018 and said “it’s not a reversal” because “2020 be the same as 2016.” “Well, I understand your question of what I told you is what the history of the Senate has been. You have to go back to 1880 to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential election year on the Supreme Court was confirmed by a Senate of a different party than the president," McConnell said.
Since Trump became president, the Senate has confirmed two justices to the Supreme Court — Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 — both of whom are considered conservative. Republicans were able to confirm the two nominees after they triggered the nuclear option in 2017, lowering the vote threshold so that a Supreme Court pick could be confirmed by the Senate with a simple majority rather than facing the previous 60-vote threshold.
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