Democrat VP Candidate Predicts Senate Will Change Rules to Confirm Supreme Court Nominee

[Geee]

Heritage Foundation:

Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine says Democrats would “change the Senate rules” to confirm a ninth Supreme Court justice if they win control of the upper chamber in November.

 

“I have a prediction,” Kaine said in an interview last week with The Huffington Post. “This is not a guarantee and I’m not revealing inside intel. I was in the Senate when the Republicans’ stonewalling around appointments caused Senate Democratic majority to switch the vote threshold on appointments from 60 to 51, and we did it on everything but a Supreme Court justice.”

 

Kaine is a U.S. senator from Virginia who in 2013 supported the then-Democrat majority’s “nuclear option” that ended the Senate filibuster on most judicial nominees.

 

Republicans, who currently control the Senate, have refused to hold hearings for President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, who serves as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Garland was nominated by Obama in March to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.