Ohio’s Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is lambasting the Senate’s Republican leadership for announcing it will not vote on any nomination President Obama makes to the U.S. Supreme Court. As WKSU’s M.L. Schultze reports for Ohio Public Radio, he says talk of waiting until the fall presidential election is hypocritical.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced within hours of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia that any nomination of his replacement by Obama would die in the Senate. And Monday, Ohio’s Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman said the country should “trust the American people to weigh in on who should make a lifetime appointment that could reshape the Supreme Court for generations.”
His counterpart, Sherrod Brown, says the American people already made that important choice in electing Barack Obama.
“The voters clearly spoke that they re-elected Obama by a pretty wide margin in ’12 and he’s the president; he should nominate somebody the Senate should consider. Not necessarily vote for him, but at least consider. But they are saying that this president should only have a three-year term and he should be disregarded for the last 11 months and they’re just wrong about that.”
Portman is one of six Senate Republicans facing re-election in a state that voted for President Obama. Both of the Democrats who want to oppose him in the fall, former Gov. Ted Strickland and Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, say the Supreme Court seat should not remain vacant for a year.
