Joe Biden is accused of hypocrisy after saying in 2016 it is the ‘constitutional duty’ of a President to name a SCOTUS Nominee

Joe Biden is accused of hypocrisy after a 2016 op-ed emerged in which he slammed Republicans for holding up a Supreme Court appointment, stating that it is the constitutional duty of a president to nominate if a vacancy becomes available. Biden was surprised and saddened to hear Republican senators say they would not longer accept a nomination because it was an election year. Biden’s words resurfaced after he blasted President Donald Trump for moving to nominate a candidate to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg.

Biden claimed that the nomination should wait until after the election in 44 days. Trump hit back at Biden, calling on him to release his own list of potential Supreme Court picks and accusing him of being afraid to alienate voters by releasing the names ahead. Shortly after Ginsburg’s death as the political battle about her replacement began, Biden tweeted his opposition to Trump attempting to push through a nominee, “The voters should pick a President, and that President should select a successor to Justice Ginsburg.”

In 2016, Biden hit out at Republicans that the president has the constitutional duty to nominate, the Senate has the constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent. It is written plainly in the Constitution that both presidents and senators swear an oath to uphold and defend. That was why Biden was surprised and saddened to see Republican leaders tell President Barack Obama and himself that they would not even consider a Supreme Court nominee that year.

No meetings.

No hearings. No votes. Nothing. It is an unprecedented act of obstruction. And it risks a stain on the legacy of all those complicit in carrying out this plan. In another 2016 speech broadcast, Biden made his position on moving forward with a nomination in an election year clear that he would go forward with a confirmation process as chairman, even a few months before a presidential election, if the nominee were chosen with the advice, and not merely the consent, of the Senate, just as the Constitution requires.

At the time, Republican senators had refused to move forward with the vetting process for Obama’s nomination to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia’s death on February 13th 2016 opened up a vacancy to which Obama nominated Merrick Garland. Garland was never confirmed and Trump’s pick Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the court. Biden has previously said that if a vacancy opens before summer in an election year, he believes the president has the green light to pick nominees.

In the last few weeks before voters head to the polls, however, Biden thinks they should be held off. This has often been called the ‘Biden Rule’ after the then-Senator made a 1992 speech encouraging a Supreme Court vacancy to be pushed post-election. After rumors surfaced in mid-June 2020 that a Justice was soon to retire, Biden claimed it would create immense political acrimony to nominate too close to the election.

Despite Joe Biden and Democrats arguments, Trump claimed at a rally in North Carolina that there was still enough time to effectively vet a nominee in the 44 days left before the election.

Trump also slammed Biden for refusing to release his own list of potential nominees, claiming that the former Vice President did not want to run the risk of losing far-left voters if his list was too moderate and vice versa. Trump claimed that if Biden released a list of names too moderate, he would lose the entire East Coast and lose the election. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that Biden needed to release his list to help voters to make up their minds.

Instead of telling the current president what to do, Biden needs to tell voters where he stands. Being transparent putting forward lists as to exactly not just what justices would look like but what their names would be is paramount importance to the American voters. Biden needs to answer those questions before telling Trump exactly how to move forward.

Biden has said he does not want to release any names until they have been properly vetted but he will chose an African American woman. Ginsburg’s death seemed certain to stoke enthusiasm in both political parties as the election could now be viewed as referendum on the high court’s decisions, including the future of abortion rights. Democrats raised more than $71 million in the hours after Ginsburg’s death, indicating her passing has already galvanized the party’s base.

Typically, it takes several months to vet and hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, and time is short before election.

Key senators may be reluctant to cast votes so close to the election, even if Trump nominates. With a slim GOP majority, 53 seats in the 100-member chamber, Trump’s choice could afford to lose only a few. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who sets the calendar in the Senate and has made judicial appointments his priority, declared unequivocally in a statement that Trump’s nominee would receive a confirmation vote.

In 2016, McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee months before the election, eventually preventing a vote on Garland. McConnell did not specify the timing if a Trump nomination is made. But trying for confirmation in a session after the election, if Trump had lost to Biden or Republicans had lost the Senate, would carry further political complications.

Democrats immediately denounced McConnell’s move as hypocritical, pointing out that he refused to call hearings for Garland 237 days before the 2016 election. The 2020 election is 44 days away. The average number of days to confirm a justice is 69, which would be after the election. But some Republicans quickly noted that Ginsburg was confirmed in just 42 days.

Obama waited more than a month to nominate Garland after Scalia died in February 2016.

Four GOP defections could defeat a nomination, while a tie vote could be broken by Vice President Mike Pence. The next pick could shape important decisions beyond abortion rights, including any legal challenges that may stem from the 2020 election. In the interim, if the court were to take cases with eight justices, 4-4 ties would revert the decision to a lower court.

On September 7th 2020, Debbie George in Charlotte, North Carolina, desperately wants Biden to carry her battleground state and defeat Trump in the general election. But from what George has seen so far, Biden just is not doing enough to galvanize support among Democrats and independents to win North Carolina. Biden needs to physically address North Carolinians, rehearsed speeches in front of no one are not cutting it.

George’s concerns underscore the uphill battle Biden appears to have if he wants to win North Carolina and its 15 electoral votes in 2020. Interviews with a number of North Carolina voters, current and former party officials, political strategists, pollsters, and politics watchers paint a picture of a critical battleground that remains within the grasp of an unpopular president, even as covid continues to ravage United States’ health and economy and protesters keep up calls for racial justice. There are factors working in Biden’s favor.

Joe Biden remains extremely popular with North Carolina’s large contingent of Black voters, a group he will need to carry with an Obama-era level of enthusiasm to win the state, and the number of absentee ballots requested by registered Democrats has soared.

Polls show Biden is also performing exceedingly well with women, suburbanites, and suburban women. But to capitalize on those prospects, Biden will need to do more than run ads and make small speeches streamed from Pennsylvania. There is a worry Biden needs to be more visible. North Carolina was always going to be difficult for Biden. Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina is the only time a Democratic presidential candidate has carried it in the last 44 years.

But given that both North Carolina and national polls show that voters feel Biden would handle the covid pandemic better than Trump, many Democrats have high hopes that Biden can reprise that success. With the general election entering a pivotal fall stretch, Biden has in recent days increased his travel schedule. After months of holding only virtual rallies and in-person events within a short drive of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden delivered a speech in Pittsburgh and traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he met with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha police.

Trump, in contrast, has had a far more robust travel schedule, holding regular visits to battleground states, including numerous stops in North Carolina in recent months. Recent polling shows the race tightening in North Carolina. The latest polling average shows a virtual tie with Biden leading Trump by 48.6 percent to 46.8 percent, a smaller lead for Biden than in averages taken by the site of recent polling.

Possibly boosting Trump, is the fact that North Carolina voters do not appear to be as dissatisfied with his response to covid as voters in other battleground states are.

A poll showed that 50 percent of likely voters in North Carolina felt Biden would do better handling the pandemic, while 41 percent said they felt that way about Trump. By comparison, polls of likely voters in Arizona (53 percent versus 36 percent) and Wisconsin (52 percent versus 35 percent) showed far higher levels of confidence in Biden in handling the pandemic. Trump has suffered a bit of a hit in North Carolina on covid, but not nearly as big as in other states.

Confirmed covid infections have surged in North Carolina. North Carolina has had the sixth most confirmed cases and the fifth most confirmed deaths from covid. Despite the rise, some North Carolina Republicans who remain bullish on its staying red in 2020 said the national visibility for Biden that began during the Democratic National Convention in August 2020 may actually help Trump exit what had been a brutal match-up with covid.

Trump has finally started to have an opponent that is not covid. Until recently, it has felt like Trump’s opponent was covid, and that was a very tough environment for him. Any one person is an easier opponent than a killer virus. In addition, the Biden campaign just has not had the physical presence in the state that Trump’s campaign has. Since July 27th 2020, Trump or Pence have visited North Carolina in person five times, including a surprise visit by both men to the scaled-down Republican National Convention in August 2020 with another trip by Trump to Winston-Salem planned.

The Trump campaign has 120 paid staffers on the ground in North Carolina and has so far made 6 million in-person and virtual voter contacts.

The campaign has also blitzed the airwaves in North Carolina with millions of dollars in ads that attack Biden, in many cases misleadingly or inaccurately. Conversely, the Biden campaign, citing the pandemic, has knocked on zero doors, not just in North Carolina, but all over the United States. Instead, Biden campaign said volunteers have dropped off campaign literature at doors.

Biden campaign had held hundreds of virtual events targeting North Carolina, had virtually recruited more than 3,000 volunteers in the state, had made over 3.5 million calls to voters in there, and is working with hundreds of organizers to engage North Carolinians. The campaign also pointed to numerous interviews with local television by Biden, as well as key surrogates, as evidence that they have had a presence in North Carolina. The Biden campaign has also saturated North Carolina airwaves with ads, part of its $45 million ad buy in battleground states, in English and Spanish.

Some attack Trump for sowing division in United States and highlight his failures with Black voters, and some focus on Biden with his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, as being committed to listening to Black people and pushing for racial justice. Others promote Biden’s plans to combat the pandemic or feature attacks on Trump’s previous threats to cut Social Security funding. The difference in the on-the-ground approach between the Trump and Biden campaigns was reminiscent of the mistakes the Hillary Clinton campaign made in 2016.

In 2016, it did not feel like the Clinton campaign took North Carolina seriously, even though they could have really made some inroads and made it a very tight race there.

Biden is taking North Carolina seriously, but, like last time, it just does not feel like they have a very strong ground game. Biden, however, may not have the same problem with Black voters, whose high levels of support are critical. Black voters handed Biden decisive victories in the Democratic primaries, but some, including voters interviewed in other battleground states, like Michigan, have strongly urged him not to take their support for granted.

Biden vowed to visit North Carolina, “I promise you, I am coming.” An analysis of North Carolina State Board of Elections data conducted showed that, amid an overall enormous rise in requests for absentee ballots, the number of registered Democrats who have already requested absentee ballots for 2020’s election is 18 times what it was at the same point in the 2016 race. By comparison, registered unaffiliated requests have multiplied 14 times the 2016 levels, while registered Republicans have made such requests at only five times the 2016 levels.

Critically, the analysis showed that the number of Black voters who have already requested absentee ballots is nearly 30 times what it was at the same point in 2016. A Monmouth University poll of registered North Carolina voters showed that 85 percent of Black voters in the state support Biden, compared to 10 percent for Trump. However, the exponential increase in absentee ballot requests by voters inclined to support Biden does not guarantee anything.

There are steps that the voter has to take in order for that ballot to be accepted, and with so many new absentees potentially, that could be a real problem.

Trump encouraged people in North Carolina to vote twice in the election, once by mail and once in person, to test the system, escalating his attempts to sow confusion and cast doubt on the validity of the results. It is illegal to vote more than once in an election. But another point favorable to Biden is that, while polls have tightened, Trump has yet to lead him in any polling average.

Because absentee voting in North Carolina has actually already started, the current snapshot of the race could have an outsize impact on the final results two months from now. The frequency with which Trump and Pence have visited North Carolina should be regarded as a major warning sign for Republicans. The fact that Trump and Pence are in North Carolina so much tells you that they are worried.

Biden can win the White House without winning North Carolina, Trump can not. But to do so, Biden will need to come and earn the votes himself. Does not have to be anything huge, but Biden’s presence in North Carolina would make a difference. On September 4th 2020, Biden had a private meeting with the family of Blake in Wisconsin, where he spoke to Blake, who is paralyzed, on the telephone.

The meeting took place in Milwaukee before Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, headed to Kenosha, where Blake, a Black man, was shot at least seven times in the back by a white police officer.