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David Axelrod On RBG Health Scare: Empty SCOTUS Seat Could ‘Tear This Country Apart’

   DailyWire.com
Protesters against US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh demonstrate at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on October 6, 2018.
JOSE LUIS MAGANA / Contributor / Getty Images

Former Obama adviser David Axelrod is worried that another empty Supreme Court seat in the age of President Trump could “tear the country apart.” His prediction came shortly after news broke that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had recently completed radiation treatment for cancer on her pancreas.

“If there is a SCOTUS vacancy next year and @senatemajldr carries through on his extraordinary promise to fill it-despite his own previous precedent in blocking Garland — it will tear this country apart,” Axelrod tweeted on Friday.

Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already promised to ram through a nominee should a vacancy open up prior to the 2020 election.

Critics have accused McConnell of reversing his 2016 policy when he effectively blocked President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, from even being considered for a vote, but as The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow pointed out, the senator’s position is consistent with his past statements:

Here’s what McConnell actually said in 2016 on the floor of the Senate.

“The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction of the Supreme Court and have a profound impact on our country, so of course the American people should have a say in the Court’s direction,” McConnell said. “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.”

McConnell then explained the “Biden rule,” which was argued by then-senator Joe Biden in 1992. Biden at the time said the Senate should not vote on a Supreme Court nominee nominated by then-President George H.W. Bush until after the election. At that time, there was a Republican in the White House but a Democrat-controlled Senate.

As attorney Gabriel Malor noted on Twitter, that is not the current case, as the president is a Republican and the Senate is Republican-controlled. In 2016, the president was a Democrat but the Senate was Republican-controlled.

Though Justice Ginsburg has proven herself to be a reliable liberal on the Supreme Court, her statements in recent days have not exactly aligned with the more fringe elements of the Left, especially in her praise of fellow Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom leftists mercilessly tried to ruin with an 11th-hour allegation of sexual assault from over 35 years ago.

“Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew,” Ginsburg said of her colleague this past June. “Thanks to his selections, the court has this term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks.”

Ginsburg later lamented to Duke Law School students that the Supreme Court nomination process has become too political.

Ginsburg has also rejected the idea of court-packing, which some Democrats have casually floated in order to overturn the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

“Nine seems to be a good number,” the justice told NPR. “It’s been that way for a long time. I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Court.”

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