On top of a great article from The Weekly Standard explaining how hypocritical Sen. Tim Kaine is on the nuclear option, America Rising is out with a new video that plainly shows how his rhetoric has changed over the past five months:
April 4, 2017
Kaine Caught: Filibuster Flip-Flop Looks Worse On Video
On top of a great article from The Weekly Standard explaining how hypocritical Sen. Tim Kaine is on the nuclear option, America Rising is out w/ a new video that plainly shows how his rhetoric has changed over the past five months:
Watch the video & read TWS‘ piece below:
Kaine: We Will Change The Rules (0:34)
KAINE: “But the rule right now requires 60 for a Supreme Court Justice because of the importance of the position and that guarantees that somebody who is going to get on the court will need bipartisan support and I think that is the right rule so we should insist on the 60-vote threshold.” (3/30/17)
ON-SCREEN TEXT: “5 Months Earlier”
KAINE: “If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies, then a Democratic Senate majority will say, ‘We’re not going to let you thwart the law,’ and so we will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.” (10/28/17)
KAINE: “We will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
Tim Kaine’s Filibuster Flip-Flop
Virginia Senator Says Democrats Would’ve Let 41 GOP Senators Reject Merrick Garland.
By John McCormack
The Weekly Standard
April 4, 2017
Less than two weeks before the 2016 elections, Virginia senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said that he would support eliminating the 60-vote hurdle to confirm Supreme Court nominees in order to get Judge Merrick Garland on the court.
“I was in the Senate when the Republicans’ stonewalling around appointments caused Senate Democratic majority to switch the vote threshold on appointments from 60 to 51. And we did it on everything but a Supreme Court justice,” Kaine told the Huffington Post on October 28, 2016. “If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies, then a Democratic Senate majority will say, ‘We’re not going to let you thwart the law,’ and so we will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
But now that the Democratic minority is filibustering Judge Neil Gorsuch and demanding a new, more liberal Supreme Court nominee, Kaine told THE WEEKLY STANDARD Monday night that if Democrats had won the 2016 elections they would’ve let a GOP minority keep Garland off the Supreme Court:
Kaine: If they gave us a vote and they voted somebody down, we would have put somebody else up. But if they had stonewalled and … refused to meet with somebody–
TWS: So if 41 Republicans said “no” to Judge Garland, you would’ve picked a different [Supreme Court] nominee?
Kaine: Yeah. Well, the president would have.
The Virginia senator added that he thought that Republicans “violated what the Constitution requires by not having hearings or votes [for Garland]. Judge Gorsuch is going to get the vote. He’s going to have the whole advise-and-consent process. The question is can he reach the 60-vote threshold.”
Given the public comments of Kaine and other Senate Democrats before the election, it’s hard to imagine that victorious Democrats actually would have let 41 Republicans reject a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. “They mess with the Supreme Court, [the filibuster will] be changed just like that,” outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid said, snapping his fingers, according to a report published at Talking Points Memo in October.
Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Democratic leader, never publicly objected to getting rid of the 60-vote hurdle for Supreme Court nominees before the election, but he now claims Democrats always wanted to keep it. “We have no intention of getting rid of the 60-vote hurdle. We didn’t then. We didn’t now,” Schumer told TWS the day Gorsuch was nominated.
Throughout U.S. history, a partisan filibuster has never been used to keep a Supreme Court nominee off the court. As William Kristol wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “Republican senators have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and they have an obligation to confirm Supreme Court justices who would do the same. If they fail to exercise their constitutional authority to confirm Gorsuch out of deference to a Senate rule that has never been used to block a qualified Supreme Court nominee—a rule that we know Democrats would eliminate if the tables were turned—they will make Chuck Schumer happier. But they will have failed the country and the Constitution.”