NBC’s Chuck Todd dedicated the entire hour of Meet the Press on Sunday to bemoaning how the Supreme Court has turned into a partisan body. Yes, even on Memorial Day weekend, Todd can’t give the partisanship a break. Even worse was Todd using a statistic with no context to paint Republicans as obstructionists when it comes to Democrat Supreme Court nominees.
After whining about how the Supreme Court has turned more conservative and partisan, Todd informed his audience of a “stunning fact.”
This so-called fact was that “the last time a Republican-controlled United States Senate confirmed a Democratic President's Supreme Court nominee: Grover Cleveland administration nearly 130 years ago.”
There was no context or additional information provided by Todd. If you didn’t know any better, you would think Republicans blocked every Democrat President’s Supreme Court nominees for 130 years.
In reality, there have been 28 appointees by Democratic Presidents since Cleveland had his last nominee confirmed in 1895, and since then all but one have been appointed and confirmed with Democrats in the majority in the United States Senate.
The only time since 1895 that a Democratic President appointed someone to the Supreme Court while Republicans controlled the Senate was in 2016 during an election year, which was in violation of the Biden rule.
Todd was completely dishonest in bringing up this fact during his opening monologue. He made it seem like Democrats frequently have their Supreme Court nominees rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate.
This kind of dishonesty is sadly commonplace in the leftist media. Statistics are frequently twisted or made up entirely in order to fit the left’s agenda.
Chuck Todd’s dishonesty on NBC’s Meet the Press was made possible by Verizon. Their information is linked.
The transcript is below:
NBC’s Meet the Press
5/28/2023
10:04:52 a.m. EasternCHUCK TODD: Here's a stunning fact. The last time a Republican-controlled United States Senate confirmed a Democratic President's Supreme Court nominee: Grover Cleveland administration nearly 130 years ago. In 2013, pushed by the obstruction of Obama's nominees to the federal courts in that moment, as well as the executive branch, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to go nuclear, in his words, ending the filibuster, the 60-vote requirement for judicial nominees below the Supreme Court.
