Poll: Americans reject Chuck Schumer's cynical, hypocritical call to delay Trump SCOTUS pick

A majority of Americans are rejecting demands from Senate Democrats to delay consideration of President Trump's nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy past the 2018 midterm elections.

An NBC News poll released Monday found that "more than six in 10 Americans, 62 percent" said that Trump's SCOTUS pick should be considered by the Senate before the November elections. A third of those polled, 33 percent, agreed with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democrats who have accused the Republicans of hypocrisy after the GOP Senate majority refused to consider President Obama's nominee Merrick Garland during a presidential election year.

The goal is simple and political. Schumer thinks Democrats might retake the Senate in November, empowering them to block President Trump's nominees until 2020, when they hope Trump will be knocked out of office. He's inventing a new Senate precedent out of thin air to achieve this goal.

Arm yourself with the facts. The actual historical precedent, as recounted by Dan McLaughlin for National Review, is that seven times in U.S. history, the Senate has held a Supreme Court vacancy open rather than confirm a presidential election-year nominee. There is no such precedent for midterm elections, no matter how much Schumer and his Senate lackeys would like to invent one.

The Democrats are the real hypocrites. They themselves previously advocated for the delay Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., put into practice after decades of unprecedented Democratic obstruction of Republican nominees. Former Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., in the presidential election year of 1992, urged President George H.W. Bush to follow "the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed." And Schumer himself in 2007 called for Democrats to refuse to consider another President George W. Bush nominee.

Of course, when Republicans used Schumer's idea against the Democrats, Schumer and the rest of the Democrats threw a tantrum. Now they're throwing another tantrum, attempting to invent a new Senate precedent for judicial nominees that is cynically intended to help the Democrats achieve their partisan political goals and keep President Trump from nominating a constitutionalist to the Supreme Court.

Schumer can keep making these ridiculous demands, but the American people aren't stupid, and they know a schmuck when they see one.

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px}

/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.

We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */