republican senate majority leader mitch
mcconnell joins us now for his first
interview since the passing of justice
ginsburg he of course is at the center
of several of these critical stories
including his own re-election
uh mr majority leader thank you for
joining us glad to be with you shannon
okay so you know folks are pointing back
to your comments from 2016
and the decision to hold off on voting
for judge merrick garland when he was
nominated by president obama
you have explained that some say there's
a distinction with no difference but
here is what your senate colleague
democrat senator dick durbin had to say
about the rush to get this done
i certainly wish senator mcconnell went
this fast when it came to
dealing with the pandemic that we have
or dealing with the economy and all the
people who are suffering
he has no time for them but when it
comes to trump's nominee for the supreme
court
he wastes no time and pulls out all the
stops your sponsor
well he knows the reason we haven't done
another rescue package is because the
speaker and the democratic leader in the
senate have been
resisting having another deal look here
are the facts
with regard to the supreme court there
have been 15 occasions
where a president has nominated
during an election year someone to the
supreme court
in eight of those 15 occasions the
president's party
was the party of the senate and seven
out of eight times
they were confirmed one time blew up in
a in a scandal
what we had in 2016 was a time of
divided government
you had the president a democrat
the senate republican divided government
you'd have to go back to 1888 to find
the last time
a vacancy on the supreme court created
during a presidential election
was filled by a party
different from that of the president so
this is entirely consistent with the
history of handling
supreme court vacancies in the middle of
presidential
elections do you think the average
american gets the nuance of that
you know the latest cnn poll says 59 of
americans think the next president
whoever is elected or re-elected
on november third should be the one who
gets to fill that seat
well i think they've not seen the
nominee yet right now this is a
hypothetical
caught up in the presidential election
by saturday afternoon
we'll have a an individual the president
said it's going to be a woman
she'll be judged on her own merits by
the american people
i'm confident he's going to make an
outstanding
nomination the american people are going
to take a look
at this nominee and conclude as we are
likely to conclude that she
well deserves to be confirmed to the u.s
supreme court
are there worries for you that some of
your members who are in very tough
reelection battles you're in a
re-election battle yourself
potentially are going to be in danger of
losing their seats
if the left is motivated by this vote
here's something
that congressman eric swalwell a
democrat who ran for president this year
had to say we have good reason to
believe that we're going to win
the senate not just arizona colorado
maine the three where we're ahead in the
polls and ahead in
the online fundraising but we're seeing
in alaska alaska of all places dr al
gross commercial fishermen running as an
independent
he's tied 43-43 with the
freshman incumbent dan sullivan so the
map is expanding in our favor
do you worry about the senate well look
we can't pick and choose when big
decisions
are forced upon us by things that we
didn't anticipate like the untimely
death
of justice ginsburg who by the way had a
spectacular
career and was an inspiration to
millions of americans
but the election is no reason to dodge
our
responsibility and not go forward with a
well-qualified nominee which i
anticipate we're going to get
saturday afternoon
so another one of your colleagues who's
occasionally crossed over to vote for
some of the judicial nominees that you
have put through at a record pace
democrat joe manchin has this to say i
hope
you understand what you're about to do
never been done you're setting a
precedent that's never been set before
talking about just how close we are to
the election for filling the seats
what do you say to him well it's not a
precedent that hadn't been said before i
already addressed that
at the beginning of our interview
there's nothing inappropriate about
filling this vacancy many supreme court
vacancies have been dealt with in a
shorter time
frame than the time frame between now
and the election or
the time frame between now and the end
of this
senate which is at the end of this
calendar year
there's nothing extraordinary about the
situation nothing unusual about the
situation
they don't like what happened i
understand that
they've been block voting against all of
our judicial nominees
anyway they're threatening to do one
thing or another but they were already
threatening to blow up the senate by
getting rid of the filibuster to admit
two states district and
the district and puerto rico and they
were already
threatening to pack the supreme court
we've heard all these threats before
we intend to move forward to exercise
our responsibility and to vote
on this outstanding nominee that we'll
get later in the week
so your counterpart the senate minority
leader chuck schumer has had plenty to
say
about this he of course is diametrically
opposed to what you plan to do
he says the president is all about
getting somebody on the court who will
help him if there is an election battle
that gets to the supreme court
and democrats are consistently also
pointing to the affordable care act a
big case there on november 10th
they say the president wants and with
your help will get
a conservative justice who will overturn
health care for millions of people
how do you answer that because it's
becoming a talking point in the campaign
trail
well it's very difficult to predict how
people vote when they get on the supreme
court it's a lifetime appointment the
founders set it up that way on purpose
and predictions about how people are
going to vote
when they get on the supreme court have
been consistently wrong
i mean you should have heard the things
that they said about john paul stevens
or about david
suter republican presidential nominees
both of them turned out to be
big liberals so it's very difficult to
predict
how somebody is going to rule because
once they put the black robe on
as chief justice roberts said or
actually
justice gorsuch said last year they
don't wear
red robes or blue robes they wear black
robes
and that is what all americans should
want all right