WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden hasn’t yet settled on a nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
But Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul, are already signaling they’d like to avoid combustible hearings like those that accompanied the selection of Justice Brett Kavanaugh three and a half years ago.
“I think the main thing that a lot of us would like to see is to show that we can be respectful and adults,” Paul told McClatchy in a recent interview.
Kentucky’s junior senator said that while he’ll center his focus on the eventual nominee’s constitutional views, he hopes his Republican colleagues will steer clear of personal attacks.
He’s referring specifically to the sexual assault and sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh that defined the hearings in the middle of former President Donald Trump’s term during the fall of 2018. Kavanaugh denied accusations from four different women and eventually won confirmation to the nation’s highest court after brutal, emotionally-wrought hearings that sparked protests and hardened partisan divisions.
“The Democrats who did that should be ashamed of themselves and unable to look in the mirror, but I promise you, I will never attack a Democrat nominee for the Supreme Court or for anything else in that kind of terms,” Paul said. “We may disagree on politics and there’s a good chance he’s going to pick somebody that has a much different understanding of the Constitution than me and I’ll voice my differences on that.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appears to also want to avoid hearings full of fireworks. CNN reported earlier this month that when North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer urged McConnell to avoid a messy confirmation fight, McConnell agreed.
“He was already there,” Cramer said, telling the network, “Let’s not change the momentum of this midterm election because we aren’t going to change the makeup of the court. Why spend a lot of time on that hill?”
The emerging calculus among most Republicans is that since Breyer is a liberal justice who will ultimately be replaced by another liberal judge, the composition of the court won’t change. Though McConnell initially warned Biden against outsourcing the choice to “the radical left,” he knows the 6-3 conservative tilt of the court will remain regardless of the outcome.
Biden has pledged to elevate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, settling on a selection by the end of February.
The top contenders are believed to be U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and U.S. District Court Judge Michelle Childs.
It seems unlikely that any of the picks will ultimately win the vote of Paul or McConnell.
Paul, at least, seems determined to show that Republicans will display their ideological opposition differently than Democrats did in the case of Kavanaugh.
“Nobody seems to remember that some of these awful people were in there chaining themselves, flopping on the ground, yelling, calling other senators rapists, they had to be arrested to leave,” Paul said recounting the Kavanaugh hearings.
“But most of them were probably given a traffic ticket and sent on their way. And I’m not saying that all the people on Jan. 6 were equivalent to that but I think that there were some people on Jan. 6 that were equivalent to these women in there.”
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