Merrick Garland deserved a hearing for Supreme Court

Judge Merrick Garland is returning to his work on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, his nomination for the Supreme Court killed without a vote by a Republican Senate majority more concerned with partisan politics than with doing its job.

The behavior of those who disposed of his nomination stands in sharp contrast to his own record and reputation as a nonideological judge.

Garland is a moderate jurist with a reputation for careful reasoning. Mere days before President Barack Obama announced Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, told a conservative news site that if the president wanted to pick a moderate, he “could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man.”

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already announced, in February, that his caucus would block any Obama nominee.

The argument that the president was a lame duck, so therefore his Supreme Court nominee should not get a hearing, is disingenuous and irresponsible. Obama had a year left in his term. And presidents have their full constitutional authority until noon on Inauguration Day. They must perform all of their duties until then.

Granted, a president must nominate justices the Senate can reasonably be asked to confirm. He can’t ask a Senate dominated by the other party to confirm someone whose judicial philosophy could appeal only to someone who shares the president’s politics. He must, when facing such a Senate, choose someone toward the middle.

Obama did that. He did his job. He picked the very judge Hatch said would be a moderate choice. The Senate did not do its job. Its refusal to confirm Garland was not based on any flaw in the nominee’s character, any deficit in his abilities or even any disagreement with his jurisprudence. It was pure partisan politics.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette