Biden claimed in a speech Sunday that President Donald Trump’s campaign had asked him to produce a list of potential Supreme Court nominees only after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday.
Trump set the standard in 2016 when he released a list of potential high court nominees for the media and voters to scrutinize before he was elected.
He did it again a few weeks ago.
The Trump campaign has been asking Biden for his list for quite some time, but to no avail.
After Ginsburg died and it was clear that the president and Senate Republicans plan to do their jobs by filling the seat she vacated, Biden was again asked to produce such a list.
But he resisted and told lied when he claimed that his chief political rival had only asked him to be transparent about the Democrats’ plan for the Supreme Court following Ginsburg’s death.
“We can’t keep rewriting history, scrambling norms, ignoring our cherished system of checks and balances. That includes this whole business of releasing a list of potential nominees that I would put forward. They’re now saying, after they — after Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, they said, ‘Biden should release his list.’ It’s no wonder the Trump campaign asked that I release the list only after she passed away. It’s a game for them. It’s a play to gin up emotions and anger,” Biden said Sunday in Philadelphia.
CNN published a story on its website noting that Biden’s claim was false.
The network’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale, accurately reported, “This is just wrong. The Trump campaign and Trump himself had repeatedly said prior to Ginsburg’s death that Biden should release a list of prospective Supreme Court nominees.”
Dale added, “When Trump released his latest list on September 9, the Trump campaign’s statement said in its title that ‘Biden must do the same.’ The campaign repeated the demand for a Biden list in a statement on September 17, the day before Ginsburg died.”
He also fact-checked Biden’s claim on Twitter:
But Biden wasn’t finished making false statements, and he wasn’t finished being fact-checked by establishment media reporters.
He claimed in the same speech that there is no urgency to confirm a high court justice because the court will not be in session between now and the election.
That statement was so wildly inaccurate that PolitiFact, CNN, ABC News and even NPR rushed to correct the record.
PolitiFact reported: “Biden said, ‘There’s no court session between now and the end of this election.’
“That’s disproven by the Supreme Court’s own website, which lists five days of oral arguments in October and two more in November before the polls close.
“We rate the statement False.”
NPR reporter Arnie Seipel also got involved:
ABC News’ Johnny Verhovek also rushed to correct the record.
“The line in Biden’s speech where he falsely claimed there is no Supreme Court session between now and Election Day is not in the prepared remarks released by his campaign, appears to have been ad-libbed,” he said on Twitter.
It’s not going to help the credibility of the fact-checkers at this point, but it’s good to see them checking facts.
Biden really stepped in it to receive this amount of attention.
Indeed, the Supreme Court will convene beginning on Oct. 5 for the first of seven days of oral arguments and three days in conference before the election.
On Nov. 3, which is Election Day, the court will hear Jones v. Mississippi, an Eighth Amendment case involving a juvenile and life sentencing.
Those are listed on the Supreme Court calendar leading up to the election.
The court might need to convene to rule on potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots.
For such a scenario, it would need to have nine justices seated.
Republicans must fill the open seat, which they intend to do.
Until then, it would be nice if the establishment media’s so-called fact-checkers would continue to apply the same scrutiny they showed Biden on Sunday.
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