(RepublicanInformer.com)- Republicans are in a good position to regain control of both the Senate and House following the midterm elections in November. If they do so, GOP leaders are promising to turn the country around by countering many of the things that the Biden administration is working to accomplish.
Mitch McConnell currently serves as the minority leader in the Senate and would likely resume his role as majority leader should the GOP win control of the upper chamber. This week, he vowed that Republicans would be “picky” about confirming nominees for President Joe Biden’s Cabinet should they retake control of the Senate.
During a meeting on Monday at the Rotary Club in Florence, Kentucky, he said:
“We’ll be way more picky over who gets to head various boards and commissions and agencies that are important to how all of you function in our society. If I’m the majority leader, we’ll be really picky on appointees.
“There are 1,200 executive branch appointments that come to us. They’re not all as important as the Supreme Court, but many of them are quite important and [need] to be confirmed by the Senate.
“We’re in the personnel business; the House is not.”
The current Senate that is led by a slight technical Democrat majority is able to easily push through any nominee that Biden puts forward, if they want to. That wouldn’t be the case with a Senate led by Republicans, though.
But, McConnell went a step further in his talks to the Rotary Club. He promised that other Biden administration initiatives would make it nowhere when they arrived in the GOP-led Senate. This includes rather large spending bills that the White House is likely to try to get passed.
As McConnell explained:
“We won’t be doing any spending bills, but if we can find ways to make some progress for the country during a time of divided government, well do it.”
While there’s no definitive opening on the Supreme Court that will come up before Biden’s term in the White House ends in 2024, McConnell said it would be “highly unlikely” that a Senate led by Republicans would approve any nominee that the president would put forward.
The minority leader has already spoken to this in the past, when he said:
“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled.”
This exact scenario happened during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. McConnell, as Senate majority leader then, refused to even consider Obama’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the court — which was Merrick Garland, who is now the attorney general under Biden.
Instead, the Senate waited until after the 2016 presidential election, and then put forth former President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee after he entered the White House — Neil Gorsuch.
