Wednesday on MSNBC, while discussing President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said despite the Republican Senate leadership insisting they won’t giving Garland a hearing, they “will crack” and have a hearing and a vote.
Schumer said, “Well, we’ve seen the ice beginning to crack, Chris. Today, six Republican senators said they would meet with Judge Garland, including Kelly Ayotte. Before today, no one was going to meet with him. That’s the first step, and I think the pressure is going to be so large—these people go home, and there are people outside all their meetings, holding up signs saying ‘do your job,’ and they don’t have any good answer as to why not. If they want to hear the person and give a very convincing reason to vote no, that’s one thing. Saying, ‘I won’t even talk to the person,’ every single week the poll numbers have gone up and up and up. So the way this is going to happen is not McConnell giving in first.”
“He always gives into the hard right who want nothing better than to have a hard right Supreme Court, that’s their number one goal,” he continued. “But either Chuck Grassley, chairman of judiciary, who are getting a lot of heat back home, not just from their editorial pages, from a lot of Republican leaders have said this, and they will crack. And I think the likelihood is we will have a hearing and a vote. I can’t predict how this will come out, but you know these hearings are sort of magical. If the nominee comes off very well, they get appointed and confirmed and we’ve had that. Two Democrats and two Republicans, the last four justices on the court, two by Democrat, two by Republican, both approved by bipartisan majorities. The hard right’s approved that once there are hearings, a guy like Garland will get on, but I believe there are going to be hearings. And there’s one other point, Chris, that is this—now that Trump looks like the front-runner, a lot of people are going to say, I don’t want Donald Trump choosing my nominee. Let’s go with this guy. I think Republicans might say that.”