During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas was accused of hypocrisy by host Chris Wallace after the Republican senator vowed to push forward with a vote to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an election year.
“Why the rush to judgement?” Wallace asked Cotton after the senator promised a swift vote on President Donald Trump’s eventual nominee.
“We’re not going to rush,” Cotton insisted. “We not going to skip steps. We’re going to move forward without delay.”
Wallace reminded Cotton that President Barack Obama named Judge Merrick Garland as his nominee after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016.
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“Senate Republicans blocked the choice of Garland,” Wallace noted before playing a clip of Cotton defending the move at the time.
In the clip, Cotton notes that the country will have a new president “in a few short months.”
“Why would we cut off the national debate about this next justice? Why would we squelch the voice of the people, why would we deny the voters a chance to weigh in on the make up of the Supreme Court?,” Cotton said at the time.
After showing the clip, Wallace pressed Cotton on his change of mind.
“Garland was nominated nine months before the election and you were saying then, nine months before the election, it was wrong to deny voters a chance to weigh in. So if it was wrong then nine months before the election, why is it OK now six weeks before the election?”
Cotton argued that Republicans won the Senate in 2014 to stop President Barack Obama’s judicial nominations, and then he claimed that the current Republican Senate is in power to uphold nominations by President Donald Trump.
“You really don’t think there is any hypocrisy at all,” Wallace pressed, “in saying, we need to give voters — because you can parse the 2014 election, the 2018 election any way you want — but you stated a pretty firm principle in 2016 about Merrick Garland: It’s wrong to deny voters a chance to weigh in.”
“You don’t see any hypocrisy between that position then and this position now?” the Fox News host wondered.
“Chris, the Senate majority is performing our constitutional duty and fulfilling the mandate that the voters gave us,” Cotton opined.
Watch the video below:
