President Barack Obama’s push to get Merrick Garland confirmed to the Supreme Court has won a boost from 15 former presidents of the American Bar Association, who called on Senate leaders in a Monday letter to take action on Garland’s nomination.
Their call came as Garland began a new round of private meetings with key Republican senators Tuesday – starting with a highly anticipated breakfast with the man who controls whether he will get a confirmation hearing, Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The breakfast in the private Senate Dining Room lasted just over an hour. Garland kept silent upon leaving, as is customary for Supreme Court nominees, and Grassley left through a back door without speaking to reporters.
His office issued a statement calling the meeting “cordial and pleasant.”
“As he indicated last week, Grassley explained why the Senate won’t be moving forward during this hyper-partisan election year” and “thanked Judge Garland for his service,” the statement read.
As the gatekeeper to further Senate action on Garland’s nomination, Grassley has acted in lockstep with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has vowed to leave the vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s February death to be filled by the next president.
That decision, the former Bar Association presidents wrote in their letter, “injects a degree of politics into the judicial branch that materially hampers the effective operation of our nation’s highest court and the lower courts over which it presides.” The signers represent 15 of the past 24 presidents of the ABA, which plays a formal role in the Supreme Court confirmation process by rating nominees’ qualifications.
While the ABA has not made a formal assessment of Garland, the former presidents noted that “Democrats and Republicans alike have noted Chief Judge Garland’s sterling credentials.”
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“The president has fulfilled his constitutional duty, and it is time for the members of the United States Senate to fulfill theirs by holding a fair hearing and timely vote for the president’s nominee,” they said.
William Neukom, who served as ABA president in 2007 and 2008, told reporters in a conference call arranged by the White House that blockade of Garland’s nomination is “frankly appalling.”
“This is a very unseemly instance of one branch of a three-branch government hobbling a second branch, the judiciary,” he said. “How dare one branch under-resource a second branch and keep it from doing its job.”
Another ex-president — Dennis Archer, the former Detroit mayor — said he expected everyday Americans to take a more active role in the protesting the blockade, to the point that they might influence the coming election: “I think it’s going to be much more, if it gets stretched out, that will take place.”