WASHINGTON — The Senate will not confirm any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Barack Obama before the November election, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, stated unequivocally Tuesday, as he urged the president to reconsider even submitting a name.
With a few cracks showing in Republican ranks, McConnell showed no sign of relenting to the pressure Obama and Senate Democrats are trying to apply.
"This is his moment," McConnell said on the Senate floor, addressing the president. "He has every right to nominate someone. Even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle, that is his right. Even if he never expects that nominee to actually be confirmed but rather to wield as an electoral cudgel, that is his right."
McConnell added: "But he also has the right to make a different choice. He can let the people decide and make this an actual legacy-building moment rather than just another campaign roadshow."
Obama has made clear that he will choose a nominee, and two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, have already broken ranks to say that they would be willing to vote on a candidate.
But McConnell and the vast majority of Republicans were holding firm.
"I don't think we should have a hearing. I think we should let the next president pick," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who a decade ago was one of 14 senators who brokered a deal to end the threat of filibusters against President George W. Bush's judicial nominees.
As Republican senators emerged from a meeting in McConnell's office, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, said, "We believe that the American people need to decide who is going to make this appointment rather than a lame-duck president."
Aides to McConnell said the majority leader had spoken to Obama and told him directly that no nominee to the Supreme Court would be confirmed before the election, and they expressed confidence that the Republicans had chosen the best course of action — or inaction, as the case may be.
McConnell gathered Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in his suite in the Capitol, just off the Senate floor, to confer before a weekly policy luncheon attended by all Republican senators.
While McConnell has already stated that no nominee will be confirmed, it is ultimately up to the committee chairman, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, to decide if any hearings will be held on Obama's pick.
Republican maneuvering came as Democrats scrambled to contain any damage from Joe Biden's floor speech as a senator in June 1992 urging President George H.W. Bush not to make a nomination to the Supreme Court until after that year's presidential election.
Biden, now the vice president, said his words were taken out of context, and he issued a statement boasting of his record in confirming federal judges while chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Aides to Biden also insisted Tuesday that he had been warning against filling a vacancy created by a voluntary resignation of a justice rather than a vacancy created by an unexpected death. In any event, no such vacancy occurred.