After U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last week, the news emerged that, shortly before her death, she had told her granddaughter that she wished that her seat would only be filled after the next presidential election. Waiting would keep Trump from getting the chance to put a third justice on the court even if he gets voted out of office in November. Trump has now been insisting that he doesn’t believe that Ginsburg ever even made that statement in the first place. He’s so crude and cravenly self-serving that he won’t leave Ginsburg’s legacy alone, days after her death.
During a Monday morning appearance on Fox & Friends, he suggested that Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) may have made up the statement. There is zero evidence whatsoever for this claim, but he reiterated it outside the White House on Monday afternoon. He told reporters, referring to the reported wish from Ginsburg:
‘It just sounds to me like it would be somebody else. I don’t believe — it could be [from her], it could be and it might not be. It was just too CONVENIENT.’
Trump is so pathologically self-obsessed that he has difficulty accepting basic reality, it seems. Watch his comments below:
"It just sounds to me like it would be somebody else" — Trump is still ludicrously insisting that RBG's final wish is somehow a forgery pic.twitter.com/CWJOq1pxT0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 21, 2020
Trump has already indicated his support for the premise of rushing through a replacement for Ginsburg. In 2016, Senate Republicans refused to even hold a vote on then-President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, citing the imminent presidential election as an excuse. This time, there’s a lot less time to go until the presidential election — early voting has already started in several states! — but Senate Republicans claim that circumstances are different and seem no longer interested in waiting to hear from the American people via the upcoming presidential election results.
McConnell claims that the original principle was that Supreme Court vacancies should not be filled during presidential election years if the White House and Senate are controlled by different political parties — since Trump is a Republican, the Senate leader takes current circumstances as a go-ahead. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have already announced their opposition to holding a pre-election confirmation vote on a Ginsburg successor.
