{"id":13134,"date":"2016-02-24T03:37:59","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T03:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=13134"},"modified":"2020-08-05T23:00:54","modified_gmt":"2020-08-05T23:00:54","slug":"oh-that-silly-thing-called-public-comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=13134","title":{"rendered":"Oh, that silly thing called ‘public comment’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

\"bidenjoe_102015getty\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A member of my family challenged me earlier today to recall a statement from a politician that seemed to contradict what President Obama has said about his upcoming nomination for someone to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

The president wants the Republican-controlled Senate to give the nominee\u00a0a fair and thorough hearing and then a vote in a “timely fashion.” Democrats are angry that GOP senators are pledging that whoever gets the nod won’t get a committee hearing, let alone a vote.<\/p>\n

One of those angry Democrats is Vice President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Oh, but wait. He said something different in 1992 when a Republican<\/em> was president. Then-Sen. Biden said President George H.W. Bush shouldn’t get a Supreme Court nominee approved in an election year.<\/p>\n

My family member brought that statement to my attention and asked me whether I opposed it then.<\/p>\n

My answer? I couldn’t remember the statement, let alone what I thought about it at the time.<\/p>\n

White House defends Biden<\/a><\/p>\n

The vice president has said that the statement has been “taken out of context.” Biden says that he added later in his Senate floor remarks that he’d consider a nominee if he or she were a moderate; Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.<\/p>\n

I, too, believe the Senate should consider a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to where we started.<\/p>\n

We hear so many things through so many channels, venues, forums and information-delivery systems that most of us can’t remember who said what, when they said it and in what context they said it.<\/p>\n

If I’d heard it\u00a0at the time I likely would have condemned it. However, that’s a hypothetical event, which politicians say they dislike. I’ll concede that I probably didn’t hear Sen. Biden say what he’s now acknowledged he said.<\/p>\n

Sure, Biden would be wrong — if he favored obstructing future high court nominations and left it at that. He says now he had more to say than what’s being reported.<\/p>\n

Fine …<\/p>\n

None of this\u00a0justifies today’s Senate leadership vow to obstruct the current president from filling a seat on the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A member of my family challenged me earlier today to recall a statement from a politician that seemed to contradict what President Obama has said about his upcoming nomination for someone to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The president wants the Republican-controlled Senate to give the nominee\u00a0a fair and thorough hearing and then a … Continue reading Oh, that silly thing called ‘public comment’<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,14],"tags":[412,540,2505,4209,5053],"class_list":["post-13134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-news","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-antonin-scalia","tag-barack-obama","tag-joe-biden","tag-senate-gop","tag-us-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13134"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43887,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134\/revisions\/43887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}