Lindsey Graham insists he hasn't changed his mind on SCOTUS nominations — but also that Kavanaugh's treatment changed his mind

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Republicans steamrolled former President Barack Obama's nominee because they said the next president should choose the nominee. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) even invited Democrats to "use my words against me" if there was an election-year vacancy come 2020 — but he seems to have changed his mind.

In a Monday letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham claimed he still felt the same about election-year vacancies. He looked back a few years to claim Americans "elected a Republican Senate majority in 2014" because they wanted a check on the end of Obama's lame duck presidency. Likewise, since the 1880s, no Senate "has confirmed an opposite-party president's Supreme Court nominee during an election year," he continued. Americans renewing a Republican Senate majority in 2018 points Graham in the same direction this time around, he said, as well as the fact that Trump is up for re-election.

But Graham went on to say that he actually had changed his mind about the nomination process after the "treatment" of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When comparing the overwhelming confirmations of Ginsburg and the testy nominating processes for Robert Bork, Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, "it's clear that there already is one set of rules for a Republican president and one set of rules for a Democrat president," Graham finished. Kathryn Krawczyk

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