Biden's Utterly False Claim on ACB's Confirmation Doesn't Even Survive a CNN Fact Check
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told a whopper about the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett over the weekend that was so big even CNN was forced to fact-check him on it.
The 77-year-old, who along with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, has refused to answer questions about packing the Supreme Court, has made President Donald Trump’s nomination of Barrett a key campaign issue.
But when discussing the thorn Barrett is in the side of Democrats, Biden made the unfounded claim Saturday that her nomination is not constitutional.
In an attempt to deflect attention away from the continued controversy surrounding his refusal to answer court-packing questions, the former vice president said, “The only court packing going on right now is going on with Republicans packing the court now.
“It’s not constitutional what they are doing,” Biden told reporters in Delaware.
“This court is being packed now by the Republicans after the vote has already begun,” he said.
Biden claims Republicans are “packing the court now.” (Republicans are not packing the court now.) Biden also claims what Republicans are currently doing is “not constitutional.” (It is constitutional.) Biden refuses to say if he’ll pack the Supreme Court.pic.twitter.com/Br15VMGeXA
— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) October 10, 2020
Biden’s stunning and disingenuous statement drew a rebuke from CNN fact-checker Tara Subramaniam.
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“This is false,” she wrote Tuesday in reply to Biden’s claim that Republicans are acting in an unconstitutional manner.
“Legal experts say there is nothing strictly unconstitutional about Barrett’s confirmation process. When asked by CNN, the Biden campaign argued that the Senate’s push to confirm Barrett ahead of the election doesn’t violate a specific clause of the Constitution, but people’s constitutional right to have a say in who makes the nomination.”
Furthermore, University of California, Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh told the network, “President Trump has the constitutional power to ‘nominate’ Judge Barrett to be a Supreme Court Justice, and the Senate has the constitutional power to ‘consent’ to that.”
“That’s all the Constitution says on the subject, and no precedents have added any extra requirements to that.”
Biden and Democrats are of course still seething about Trump’s nomination of Barrett a week after the death of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month.
While Democrats would have liked for the seat previously occupied by Ginsburg to remain in the hands of the court’s liberal wing, there is not only nothing unconstitutional or illegal about nominating Barrett; it’s actually the duty of the president to fill such a vacancy.
The Senate, in this case, is currently run by a simple GOP majority, which has gladly taken up the task of confirming Barrett.
That didn’t happen in 2016, when Democratic lame-duck President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
For Democrats, it’s as simple as this: If they wanted Garland confirmed by the Senate in that election year, then they should have retained control of the Senate in 2014.
This time around, at least until January, they again have no say in the matter of confirming a high court nominee.
Life is hard sometimes.
Republicans took a majority in Senate in the 2014 midterm elections and have held it since, and so Barrett seems well on her way to becoming the ninth justice on the Supreme Court, as she should.
Even still, Biden’s false statements on the issue are indicative of how desperate he and Democrats are to stop a 6-3 or 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority from taking shape.
The fact that Biden’s claims about Barrett’s nomination couldn’t even make it through a CNN fact check are indicative of just how deceptive he and Democrats are on issues relating to the court.
Of course, at this point, the real issue with regard to the judiciary is when/if Democrats will pack the Supreme Court.
We’ll know a lot more about the possibility of that after the election.
But we don’t need a fact check, from CNN or any other organization, to tell us Democrats will absolute attempt to pack the court, and violate any other governmental norms they fancy, should they take the Senate, the White House or both next month.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
