South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told "
Fox News Sunday" that he is "hell-bent" on ensuring that the next Supreme Court vacancy -- whether it is
ailing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat or otherwise -- is filled by a conservative, regardless of what outrage follows from the left.
Graham,
the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emphasized
that former Democratic Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid eliminated the
Senate filibuster for federal appellate judicial nominees in 2013.
Republicans later retaliated by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme
Court appointments, meaning that a simple majority -- rather than a
60-vote supermajority -- is sufficient to confirm new Supreme Court
nominees.
"My Democratic colleagues felt when they were in charge
we should confirm judges by a majority vote," Graham told Fox News'
Chris Wallace. "They changed the rules to accommodate President Obama.
They tried to stack the court. They never thought [Hillary] Clinton
would lose. So what you’re gonna have is Harry Reid’s and Chuck
Schumer’s desire to stack the court on their Democratic watch has come
back to haunt them."
Ginsburg
will miss next week’s Supreme sessions
and work from home, but her recovery from early-stage lung cancer
surgery remains "on track" and no further treatment is needed, the court
announced Friday. The 85-year-old’s absence this past week from oral
arguments -- her first since joining the bench -- after her surgery in
December sparked speculation about a possible departure and led to
low-key planning by the White House for that scenario.
Following
the contentious confirmation hearings of now-Associate Justice Brett
Kavanaugh, which were marked by a series of lurid, uncorroborated sexual
misconduct allegations, Graham asserted that there would be "pushback
from the left" regardless of whom Trump nominates.
"If there is an
opening, whether it’s Ginsburg or anybody else, I will urge the
president to nominate a qualified conservative and hopefully those
people will get through – that person will get through," Graham
continued. "And I expect it to be along party lines, and this is what
happens when you change the rules. This has come back to bite ' em. I
predicted it would. And we’ll see. I hope Justice Ginsburg serves for a
long time. But if there’s an opening on this court, I’m going to be
hell-bent to put a conservative to replace whoever steps down for
whatever reason."
Pressed by Wallace as to whether it was appropriate to nominate a conservative to replace a
liberal icon like Ginsburg, Graham again said liberals have only Reid to blame -- and he suggested Kavanaugh's treatment meant that all bets are off.
"They
should’ve thought of that before they changed the rules," Graham
responded. "They tried to destroy conservative judges. I voted for
[Sonia] Sotomayor and [Elena] Kagan, understanding what I was getting,
so this decision by Reid and Schumer may come back to haunt them, but I
am dead set on making sure it is a conservative nominee. And elections
have consequences. The rules of the Senate were changed not by me, by
them, and we had to do it on the Supreme Court because they would not
give us any votes to nominate anybody. And Kavanaugh was a fine man,
they tried to destroy him. All this is going to come back to haunt them
one day."
He added: "We don't need one Democrat to replace a
liberal justice. And the reason that that's the case is because of what
Harry Reid did. What he set in motion."
Separately, Graham
asserted that President Trump is still ready and willing to make a deal
with congressional Democrats to end the ongoing partial federal
government shutdown, although the window is rapidly closing.
Graham
suggested that the White House would likely approve a compromise that
extended protections afforded to Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
recipients who fled natural disasters, in exchange for funding for
Trump's proposed border wall.
On the 20th day of a partial government shutdown, federal
employees rally at the Capitol to protest the impasse between Congress
and President Donald Trump over his demand to fund a U.S.-Mexico border
wall, in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 10, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott
Applewhite)
"I just talked to him about thirty minutes ago -- he
says, 'Let's make a deal,'" Graham told host Chris Wallace. "The plan is
to do a deal. He is willing, in my view, to do wall-plus. Funding for
the wall that we desperately need, that's been done in the past -- see
if we can do a deal around the TPS recipients. There's about 400,000.
They're going to lose their legal status soon. He's willing to extend
that."
Graham added that Trump would be willing to offer work
permits to recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) program for those brought to the U.S. illegally as
children -- a compromise the White House
had backed
last summer. However, Graham noted, Trump's planned rescission of the
DACA program is working its way through the appellate court process, as
several federal judges
have ruled
that the White House violated federal administrative law by ending DACA
without offering legally sufficient notice or justification. (The Trump
administration has primarily argued that DACA was unconstitutionally
enacted by Obama's unilateral order.)
"The
DACA recipients, they’re all tied up in court, but I think he would
give them work permits for three years, one-time renewable, if he could
get wall funding." Graham said. "I don’t want to speak for the
president. I don’t want to lock him in. But I’m confident what I just
described with a few other things would be a deal acceptable to the
White House and a lot of Democrats, and I’m just so frustrated we can’t
get in a room and hammer it out."
Graham on Friday urged Trump to
invoke his presidential emergency powers to immediately begin
construction of the wall without congressional approval. The White
House last week
directed the Army Corps of Engineers
to look at possible ways of funding border security, including
potentially through the reallocation of unspent disaster relief funds,
in a possible sign the administration is moving in that direction.
"What's [Trump] supposed to do, just give in? He's not gonna give in."
— South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham
The
South Carolina senator told Wallace he's not worried about Democrats
similarly invoking a state of emergency to bypass Congress, both because
they would have a weaker legislative argument and because Republicans
would likely be more willing to compromise to achieve a compromise
solution.
Challenged by Wallace for his criticism of President
Obama's use of executive authority to enact DACA as "presidential
overreach," Graham responded that no emergency was declared to enact
DACA. Should the White House move forward with an emergency declaration,
it has a handful of legal routes to take. The National Emergencies
Act grants the president broad authority to declare emergencies, and
several federal laws then could clear a path for the White House to move
ahead with building a wall.
One statute, 33 U.S. Code § 2293 - "Reprogramming
during national emergencies," permits the president to "apply the
resources of the Department of the Army’s civil works program, including
funds, personnel, and equipment, to construct or assist in the
construction, operation, maintenance, and repair of authorized civil
works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are
essential to the national defense."
Another law, 10 U.S. Code §
2808 - "Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or
national emergency," permits the secretary of defense, in a
presidentially declared emergency, to use "funds that have been
appropriated for military construction" for the purpose of undertaking
"military construction projects."
Graham
said reasonable Democrats -- including Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris
Coons, who spoke to Wallace later on "Fox News Sunday" and suggested he
is open to negotiation on the border wall -- would be willing to make a
deal without forcing Trump to use those emergency powers. ("I agree with
the advice that Lindsey Graham just gave to the President which is that
he should reopen the government and we should spend several weeks
negotiating over what we can all agree on," Coons said. "I personally
don’t think that a border wall is .... immoral.")
But, Graham
said, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who has called the wall an
"immorality" -- has unreasonably cut off negotiations by saying she
would not give more than one dollar to Trump's wall under any
circumstances.
"Every Democrat that I've worked with for about 10
years now has agreed to funding for barriers/walls on Obama's watch, on
Bush's watch, and all of a sudden it's a bad thing on Trump's watch,"
Graham told Wallace. "What's [Trump] supposed to do, just give in? He's
not gonna give in."
Graham concluded with his own possible
last-minute fix to the partial federal government shutdown, which became
the longest in the nation's history on Wednesday.
"I would urge
him to open up the government for a short period of time, like three
weeks, before he pulls the plug," Graham said. "See if we can get a
deal. If we can’t at the end of three weeks, all bets are off. See if he
can do it by himself through the emergency powers. That’s my
recommendation. But I think the legislative path is just about shut off
because Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House, said ‘Even if you open up
the government, I’ll give you one dollar for the wall.’ As long as
that’s the case, we’re never gonna get a legislative package, no matter
what the Senate does."
