-We said that if for any reason,
we have a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court,
we will fill that vacancy.
-Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death has created a vacancy
on the Supreme Court on the eve of the 2020 election.
One of the things that we've seen over the last several years
is the increasing move towards treating judges
and Supreme Court nominees like elections.
-For President Trump, this is the end of a 3 1/2-year
power play with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Republicans have overhauled the federal judiciary
in recent years, installing conservatives at every turn.
-This moment is a chance for Republicans to cement
this conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years,
if not a generation.
-What used to be a sort of consensus
"is the person qualified" investigation
has become much more of a "What does the person stand for?
How would they vote?
How is that going to affect the issues that we care about?"
-Judge, do you swear to give at this hearing,
in response to questions, the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
-I do, Mr. Chairman.
-Supreme Court vacancies have always had a political charge,
but they became electric in the 1980s
with the nomination of Robert Bork.
The vacancy of Justice Lewis Powell led President Reagan
to nominate a favorite of the conservatives,
and he wanted to move the court to the right.
But it led to a total showdown on Capitol Hill.
-Robert Bork's America is a land in which women
would be forced into back-alley abortions,
blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,
rogue police could break down citizens' doors
in midnight raids.
-We are still living in the wake of the Bork nomination.
It led to a firefight years
later over Clarence Thomas' nomination.
-As a black American, as far as I'm concerned,
it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks
who in any way deign to think for themselves.
-If you start to look at that repeated escalation,
you can kind of look back into the George W Bush years.
Senate Democrats waged the first successful filibuster
of a circuit court nominee under George W Bush.
When President Obama took office and Senate Democrats
were in the majority,
Republicans in the minority repeatedly filibustered
many of President Obama's judicial picks,
particularly to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
So in November 2013, Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid and most Senate Democrats
voted to go nuclear, so every single nominee
except for nominees to the Supreme
Court could be advanced
and confirmed with a simple majority vote.
-The Senate is a living thing, and to survive, it must change.
-I'd say to my friends on the other side of the aisle,
you'll regret this,
and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
-Today, I am nominating Chief Judge Merrick Brian Garland
to join the Supreme Court.
-Merrick Garland's nomination experience
and the way Senate Republicans decided not to give it a vote,
even on the Senate Judiciary Committee --
that poisoned the well, and that well has remained
poisoned inside of the Congress ever since.
-The Senate's duty is to advise and consent.
You know what?
The Senate is advising right now.
We are advising that a lame-duck president
in an election year is not gonna be able
to tip the balance of the Supreme Court.
-Our job is to go forward with the process,
and then we'll see what happens.
-Mitch McConnell moved very quickly to announce
that there will be no confirmation hearing.
-People can choose to meet or not meet as they see fit,
but this nominee is not gonna be considered.
-By 2017, when Trump
nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,
Republicans eliminated that 60-vote
threshold for Supreme Court nominees, as well.
-If Judge Gorsuch fails to earn 60 votes
and fails to demonstrate
he is mainstream enough to sit on the highest court,
we should change the nominee, not the rules.
-We need to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate
and get past this unprecedented partisan filibuster.
-The Garland experience colors everything right now
in the Trump era when it comes to judicial nominations,
and it continues to recent years
with the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh.
-This whole two-week effort has been a calculated
and orchestrated political hit.
-The most despicable thing I have seen
in my time in politics.
You want this seat?
I hope you never get it.
-We have an obligation under the Constitution,
should we choose to take advantage of it,
with a president of the same party as the Senate,
to advance a nomination.
-There's nothing really new about the idea
that politics affects judicial nominations.
I mean, it's a political process.
What has become new is this idea
that that's sort of exactly what a justice does.
-Will you commit to voters tonight
that religious liberty will be
an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint,
not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts?
-Yes, I would. -Each confirmation has been more
and more on a party-line vote,
to the point that it's sort of an open question
whether a president trying to fill a Supreme Court vacancy
with the Senate of another party would be successful
whether he or she could even get a vote.
-The Senate has become a deeply divided institution,
and that atmosphere inside the Senate informs
what's happening with the Ginsberg vacancy.
-Every nominee, including Justice Kennedy
in an election year, got an up-and-down vote.
The Senate should not act until after the American people
select their next president.
-I think it's up to Mitch McConnell
and everybody else to stop it.
It's called delay, delay, delay.
We have an obligation to do what's right
and act as quickly as possible.
-By virtue of the reverse roles,
we've seen both Republicans and Democrats
make very different arguments between 2016 and 2020,
in many ways echoing the other side from four years before.
-If these guys think they're gonna stonewall
the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies,
then a Democratic Senate majority will say,
"We're not gonna let you thwart the law."
And so we will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.
We're insisting that we're gonna vote
under that 60-vote threshold.
-If there's a Republican president in 2016
and a vacancy occurs
in the last year of the first term, you can say,
"Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president,
whoever it might be, make that nomination."
We've got the votes to confirm the judge,
the justice on the floor of the Senate before the election.
We have seen the court move to the center
of American political life
as Congress has really begun to not function as an institution.
Political change now
doesn't necessarily happen on Capitol Hill.
It happens within the federal judiciary.
-The Supreme Court itself has been drawn into this sort
of political fight between the two parties
in a way that many would argue the founders never intended.
-So, Article II of our Constitution says,
"The President shall nominate justices of the Supreme Court."
-Certainly, the vacancy creates another "X" factor
in the 2020 presidential race, and it's one that the President
seems to believe could accrue to his benefit.
-Republicans worry at times about the courts
and whether they're moving too far to the left.
Democrats now are talking about the idea of court packing.
Debates matter, and the campaign matters,
but the Supreme Court is now at the center of the campaign.
-The judiciary is increasingly politicized.
Judges and justices are seen as an extension
of the political parties who confirm them.
President Trump's choice is gonna change the court
to a 6-3 conservative majority.
And when there are only nine members, that's a big change.
-It's about power, it's about politics,
and it all comes just weeks before the election.