President Barack Obama is committing to his Supreme Court nominee through the end of his term, saying he will stick with Merrick Garland as his pick no matter who is elected president.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Obama was asked by host Chris Wallace if he would consider pulling Garland’s nomination if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
“Absolutely not,” Obama definitively told Wallace in the clip.
“What I think we can’t have is a situation in which the Republican Senate simply says because it’s a Democratic president we are not going to do our job, have hearings and have a vote,” Obama said in the interview, airing in full Sunday.
“Because if that happens, Chris, then it is almost impossible to expect that the Democrats, let’s say a Republican president won, then the Democrats wouldn’t say the exact same thing. They’ll say, let’s wait for four years and we’ll take our chances on the next President.”
The interview took place at the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama spent the day making his case for Garland by arguing that without substantive concerns about Garland’s record, Republicans were blocking his nomination solely on political grounds.
