In an interview with NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, President Barack Obama spoke about why he nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Partial transcript as follows:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “But one of the things that’s broken down in our politics is a recognition that you don’t always get your way 100 percent of the time. And sometimes in the integrity of the institution and the process and governance, and the interests of the American people actually matter more than your short-term politics. They actually matter more than doing what is politically expedient. And there have been a number of times where, as president of the United States, I’ve had to do things that I knew were bad politics but I understood were important to the country or important to the institution of the presidency.
And I would expect that the senators who’ve been elected by their constituents will find in themselves the kind of respect for this incredible democratic experiment that our founders crafted, that they’re not going to want to see it continue to degenerate into just a bunch of poll-driven, negative-ad-driven, polarized name-calling, because that’s not what made us the greatest country on Earth.
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