Good idea from Steve Benen: Let's start using Sen. Chuck Grassley's decades old comments about the Supreme Court against him, just like the Republicans have done with Vice President Joe Biden. And let's call it the "Grassley Rule." Here's what Right Wing Watch found in looking through the archives.
One wonders what 2005 Chuck Grassley would say to his 2016 self. In April of that year, during an appearance on MSNBC's "Hardball," Grassley told host Chris Matthews that "every nominee should have an opportunity to have an up-or-down vote."
That same month in a statement on his website titled "Talking Judges to Death," the Iowa senator wrote, "It's time to make sure all judges receive a fair vote on the Senate floor." […]
Grassley's advocacy for the Senate doing its job did not stop in the spring of 2005. In September of that year, after President Bush appointed John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Grassley cited Alexander Hamilton in claiming that "the purpose of our activities here of confirming people for the courts" was "to make sure that people who were not qualified did not get on the courts. In other words, only qualified people get appointed to the courts and that political hacks do not get appointed to the courts." […]
In that same speech he stated that the president "had a mandate to appoint whom he wanted appointed, as long as they were not political hacks and as long as they were qualified" and that the president had "primacy in the appointments to the Supreme Court."
That's just a smattering of Grassley’'s 2005 and 2006 musings about the Senate's job in confirming Supreme Court justices, including even more quotes from Hamilton about the Senate's duty to act on presidential nominations. Each instance is laced with demands that the president's nominees get the "up-or-down vote" that is their due. Because, of course, they were nominated by a president, like Hamilton said they should be. And it's the Senate's job to give them a hearing and a vote, like Hamilton said.
Except that was then and this is now. What a difference the nation's first African American, and Democratic, president makes.
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