Sen. Kelly Ayotte is doing her damnedest to distract public attention away from her and the fact that she's doing the bidding of the most hated elected official in the nation, Mitch McConnell, in the Senate. She's trying to gin up a scandal over an incident in which her Democratic opponent's (Gov. Maggie Hassan) husband was principal at Phillips Exeter Academy. She's doing her level best to make this a thing, but at the outset it doesn't seem to be that.
Meanwhile, Ayotte is going to have to start answering the questions that naturally arise from this: her willingness to support Donald Trump for president.
“Listen, I think, what I’ve said is, at this point I plan to support our Republican nominee,” Ayotte told New Hampshire local radio’s Dan Mitchell on Thursday morning. “That said, I got to tell you, I don’t know who that’s gonna be. I think that this is far from over. This process still has to play out and you know, I want to see what happens at this convention, obviously.”
Asked again, if Trump emerged as the nominee if she’d support him, Ayotte said, “I plan to support our Republican nominee.”
Not a rousing endorsement, but one nonetheless. Given Ayotte is fully committed to blockading a Supreme Court Justice "until the people have spoken by electing a new president," Ayotte believes it would be fine to have Trump shape the Supreme Court. Because that's a four-year term he would be elected to and it's pretty darned likely that there will be more vacancies on the court in those four years.
In essence, this is what almost all Republican senators are saying—that they're absolutely fine with the guy none of them really wants to be president in putting his stamp on the Supreme Court. That'll work fine in plenty of states, but it's probably not going to go over so well with all New Hampshire voters.
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