Spin Zone: Q2, 2016

[DMH]

Name: 

Media/Outlet: 

Reason: (Ex. Why I Love SCOTUS) 

 

[Bullet points/brief outline of talking points during appearance.]

 

Due by March 16th, at 11:59 PM EST.

[Hannah]

Name: Heather James
Media: Morning Joe on MSNBC

Reason: Supreme Court vacancy

• "There is absolutely no reason why the Senate should not consider President Obama's nomination to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Denying a duly elected President the ability to nominate a candidate to fill a vacancy is without historical precedent and would amount to a legislative coup. President Obama was elected by 65 million Americans; Mitch McConnell by 800,000 voters in Kentucky. The Senate Majority Leader is ignoring historical precedent and confirming that after 8 years, Republicans are still unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency."
• "Since 1916, every nominee to fill a vacancy on the Court has been acted on by the Senate. 5 of them have been confirmed in election years, most recently Justice Kennedy in 1988, under President Reagan. The Senate Judiciary Committee has never denied a hearing to a nominee since it began holding hearings. This act of political obstruction is completely without precedent."
• "Turning this kind of gamesmanship into a new precedent should trouble Republicans as much as Democrats. If we're to stop filling vacancies in election years, the confirmation process will grind to a halt altogether. Once President Obama unveils his nominee, the Judiciary Committee should convene to hold hearings, and should forward that nomination to the Senate. The average confirmation process in modern times has been 70 days, and there are over 300 days to the election, so there is absolutely no excuse for Republicans trying to run out the clock on this."

[Starnes]

Name: Cliff Fleming (R-AL)

Media/Outlet: Fox News

Reason: SCOTUS

 

• Democrats established the precedent we're following when their own Vice President said "...the president move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself."
• Democrats are the one who abolished the Supreme Court Judicial filibuster so that they could continue to politicize the process that they say needs to be held up to the level of sanctity that it deserves. But they sit there and pretend like the American people won't recognize the true people trying to use the American people and the Supreme Court as the pawns of their game of continued partisan divide.
• Democrats didn't even know if the President was going to nominate someone to fill this post, they don't know who this is going to be, but they've talked about how it had to happen and then gave off a list of a number of divisive issues that they want the court to continue to tackle. Because that's what the Democrat Party sees the Supreme Court as, their way to subvert the democratic processes in this country and rule by fiat.

[Douglas Butcher]

Name: Sen. Douglas Butcher (R-LA)

Media/Outlet: The O’Reilly Factor

Reason: Supreme Court Vacancy

 

• There are going to be some who talk about President Obama having the right to nominate a candidate and that the Senate has an obligation to hear it. The interesting thing about this is that the current siting vice president is the one who back in the Reagan years was talking about the inappropriate nature of nominating a Supreme Court candidate during an election. So, we have not established this so-called rule. It’s your vice president who established this rule. Or it could have been Neil Kinnock. Hard to tell.
• Despite an excellent smoke and mirrors campaign convincing people he’s statesman, nobody ever confused Joe Biden with Albert Einstein or pointed to him as a model of intellectual consistency.
• Some are going to be looking back on that nomination in 1988 when we saw Anthony Kennedy confirmed. People forget that the vacancy opened in 1987.  It was the retirement of Justice Powell. Then, of course, we saw the Bork nomination which led to the Ginsburg nomination. Both of those were derailed by Democrats engaging in hyper-partisan nonsense. So, even then, Reagan wasn’t starting the nomination process in an election year.
• Anthony Kennedy was nominated on November, 11 1987. Anybody who says that 1987 is 1988 is just an idiot.
• The process will play out, Bill, and we will use our checks and balances to determine the right path forward. I have absolute confidence in that. If we invoke the Biden rule, we invoke the Biden rule. It’s not the Cheney rule or the Quayle rule is it?

[Tuna]

Name: Doug Murphy
Media: Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN

Reason: Supreme Court vacancy

• "Set aside all the drama and derived talking points, Anderson. These chickenloaf games McConnell is playing with the Supreme Court, he's doing it for reasons that neither he nor any of the Republican presidential candidates will publicly admit: they're gunning for Roe, Obergefell, and Windsor. They view this not as an opportunity to confirm a highly qualified justice who will serve the people. Rather it's a tawdry attempt by them to legislate from the bench what they could never get done at the ballot box or in Congress. Why? Because the American people would never stand for it."
• "And let's not get it twisted. This low-brow dumpster politicking is exactly how Kat McCord, Rollins, and Kuykendall will govern. Ignore the norms of our democracy, shirk the other side, split us apart and undermine our legal system to satisfy the corporate donors and fringes. By hook or by crook, they will find any excuse imaginable to avoid engaging across the aisle or fulfilling their responsibilities as elected officials, as long as it means more power in their pockets. If McCord, Rollins, and Kuykendall want the American people to believe they are serious about uniting the country, they will stand up to Mitch McConnell and prove their merit as good government conservatives." 
• "If Senate Republicans going to force the rest of the country through nine months of this nonsense, if they're going to say let the people decide the next president decide, then the American people are well within their right to expect a swift confirmation of whoever the next President nominates and puts forward. If they're going to set this standard, they better abide by it."

[John E]

Name:  John Carlsen
Media: Meet the Press (NBC)

Reason: Supreme Court vacancy

 

* With the death of Justice Scalia, ordinarily the Senate would be allowed to consider a potential replacement.

* My own preference was for the President and Senate Majority Leader to sit down together and find a list of nominees they could both live with.

* Unfortunately, Senator McConnell pre-empted any discussions by issuing a diktat that no nominee will be considered this year, leaving the Supreme Court at eight Justices.

* Presidents Taft, Wilson, Hoover, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan have all had their nominees considered in a Presidential election year.  Weirdly, Republicans have decided that a speech by the Vice President 17 years before he became Vice President is a "binding rule" from the Obama Administration.  That, of course, is poppycock.
* My recommendation is still that the President and Senate Majority come together to find a way forward.  

[Sovereign]

Name: Alex Fakhouri
Media: The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC

Reason: Supreme Court Vacancy
 

• I said before, and I'll say it again: Americans must ask themselves why the Senate GOP is pursuing this now. Why are they denying this President's nominee before we even know their name, when every virtually single Supreme Court pick has at least got their day at a hearing? Why are Republicans basing this claims on a comment from 25 years ago that could be compared to idle chitchat in the backroom at room? Well, we only need to look at Majority Leader McConnell's own words back in 2010, when he brazenly admitted to the National Journal that he intended to make President Obama a one-term president. This is nothing more than unprecedented partisan gamesmanship aimed at politicizing our nation's highest court, and it's nothing short of inappropriate.

 

• Since 2012, we have seen landmark decisions protecting same-sex marriage, United States v. Windsor in 2013 and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. The timing of this is not a coincidence. Meanwhile, we have seen a growing trend in hate crimes against the LGBT community these past few years. From 2013 to 2014 alone, the FBI reported hate crimes related to gender identity grew by more than 200%. Clearly, there is rabid fomenting of hatred out there, and the GOP is in the center of it. You better believe if they get their Supreme Court pick, it will lead to the overturning of Windsor, Obergefell, and, ultimately their long-stated target, Roe v. Wade.

 

• Because of this stunt, the Supreme Court will be without a key vote for nearly a year. This is not a Court that can function, and several high-level decisions are being left on the backburner as a result. The question of the birth control mandate from the Affordable Care Act is on the table. The Supreme Court is also set to discuss President Obama's expansion of DACA and deferment of five million undocumented immigrants. Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is a challenge to a Texas law that may well shut down nearly 75% of reproductive clinics in the state. These are all very important, yet oft-not discussed decisions, that need to be addressed by the Court.

Edited March 15 by Sovereign

[Starnes]

Name: Cliff Fleming (R-AL)

Media/Outlet: CNN - Anderson Cooper 360

Reason: Nomination of Paul Watford

 

• Look Anderson, I feel bad for two people right now in this whole mess. Vice President Joe Biden and Judge Watford. The Democrat Party, especially Senate Democrats, have completely thrown both of these men under the bus because their so wound up and focused on the 2016 election. They basically said that Joe Biden is a blithering idiot who nobody should listen to, and remember these are Democrats saying that, and now Paul Watford isn't worthy of consideration based upon his qualifications, his history or his ability, but because of the party of the person who nominated him.
• Throughout this whole affair you've seen members of our side of the aisle, or I guess I should say mine rather *chuckles*, who have said this is about the process. This is about following a precedent that then-Senator Joe Biden tried to establish decades ago and became even more necessarily when Senate Democrats cranked the divisiveness up to 10 by eliminating the Judicial filibuster for SCOTUS nominees. We didn't do this, Harry Reid did this.
• Democrats have made it clear, even here on this very show, that they don't see this as an avenue to govern. They don't see this as a way to make sure that the highest court in the land maintains the level of respect it deserves, they see this as a ploy to drive people to the ballot boxes in November. Doug Murphy talks about it all the time on the campaign trail and on social media. The man who endorsed him, EverHart, who said he'd be a heartbeat away from the President, talks about it. But you know what they've yet to do? Make any actual case to the American people about why this needs to be done other than for them to try and win votes. Republicans haven't said that no Democrat will ever again get to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, we just said that the group who formed this government, the people, should get a chance to weigh in. And Vice President Biden agrees with us.

[Hannah]

Name: Heather James
Media: News interview on FOX13 (KCPQ Tacoma–Seattle)

Reason: Cuba

• "I welcome President Obama's outreach to Cuba. No one is denying that there are still serious human rights abuses in Cuba that must be addressed, but engagement with the regime is more likely to bring about real political change and expose the Cuban people to new social, political and economic ideas than is continuing a Cold War cold shoulder policy that hasn't been relevant for 25 years. I want to see freedom of speech and assembly, freeing of political prisoners and an end to arbitrary seizure and detention, and real free elections: and all those things are more likely, not less, with US engagement."
• "This is a small step from President Obama, and it hasn't ended the embargo. That said, I do continue to support ending the embargo. Way back in 2001, when I was a freshman Senator, I worked with Representative Nethercutt, a Republican, to open up Cuba's markets to US agricultural exporters, including farmers here in Washington state. Unfortunately, the bipartisan support for that dwindled and Washington exports to Cuba fell from tens of millions of dollars to tens of thousands. Producers of apples, peas, lentils, growing crops here in Washington, have a lot to gain from access to Cuba's markets."
• "The US does business with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Russia. We have a thriving trade with Vietnam. Opening up markets is good for American businesses, for Cuban people who import so much of their food, and for the promotion of American values including the very principles of freedom and democracy that supporters of the embargo supposedly triumph. It's an antiquated policy, and the America of the 21st century should embrace open and free trade, including with Cuba. That does not mean compromising on our commitment to Havana enacting meaningful political and human rights reform."