Mitch McConnell: Kethledge Won’t Face Hurdles with Liberals

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is aggressively lobbying President Trump for a Supreme Court pick such as Judge Raymond Kethledge who does not have a record of conservative opinions that would turn off liberals.

Breitbart News has learned that, in private conversations with left-leaning reporters, McConnell is pushing the notion that Judge Raymond Kethledge will be unlikely to raise the ire of his Senate colleagues, potentially sparing him a confirmation battle in an election year.

“McConnell has said he does not want a SCOTUS battle in an election year,” a source familiar with McConnell’s off-the-record conversations with at least one journalist told Breitbart News. “He thinks Kethledge would be easy to confirm because Kethledge is not a consistent conservative.”

According to the New York Times, McConnell has made “multiple phone calls” to the president and White House Counsel Don McGhan urging them to nix conservatives like Judge Amy Barrett.

McConnell or sources familiar with his thinking indicated to the New York Times that he specifically hopes to attract the support of Senate Democrats with a Kethledge nomination. “Three red-state Senate Democrats up for re-election this year voted to confirm Justice Gorsuch, and Mr. McConnell is hopeful they will support the next nominee,” the Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin wrote Saturday. “But his advisers say he is prepared to push through the nominee with only Republican votes[.]”

These revelations exposed McConnell’s role in the “whisper campaign” for Kethledge, to the detriment of candidates like Kavanaugh and Barrett just as multiple media outlets began reporting that the Sixth Circuit judge is the “compromise” or “consensus” pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy. This trend continued Sunday, with Time magazine reporting that Trump has now adopted Never Trump pundits’ “Gorsuch 2.0” moniker for Kethledge.