Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala D. Harris said Monday that the American people aren’t about to allow the “infection” President Trump has spread throughout the country to infiltrate the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We will not give up and we will not give in,” Ms. Harris said in a speech in North Carolina. “We will not let the infection that President Trump has injected into the presidency and into Congress that has paralyzed our politics and pitted Americans against each other spread to the United States Supreme Court.”
Democrats have generally conceded that they’re powerless to actually block Republicans from confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s pick to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump and the Republicans are scared of what American voters have to say about the issue.
“We’re not in the middle of an election year. We’re in the middle of an election,” said Ms. Harris, a senator from California. “Almost a million Americans have already voted.”
She and other Democrats have said the winner of the Nov. 3 election should be the one to fill the vacancy, citing Republicans’ 2016 blockade of Judge Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick.
Ms. Harris, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, attracted attention with her sharp questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018.
But it was Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a former 2020 rival, who was the one to coax an actual apology out of Justice Kavanaugh after he tried to turn a question of whether he had ever been blackout drunk back on Ms. Klobuchar.
Democrats’ protestations during the Kavanaugh proceedings didn’t change the ultimate outcome, and the Senate voted to confirm his nomination on a 50-48 vote.
