According to The Hill, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told in a shocking statement that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would’ve won the 2016 presidential election if former President Barack Obama had nominated a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
While communicating with the newspaper, the South Carolina Democrat brought up Obama’s nomination of now-Attorney General Merrick Garland for the vacancy that arose after the February 2016 death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.
He said, “I’ll always believe that if this had been done when Garland’s name went up that Hillary Clinton would have been president,”.
He continued: “All you’ve got to do is look at voter turnout. Look at Hillary Clinton’s turnout. I just think the Black vote would have been much more incentivized in Michigan, for instance, and other places, that I think would have made a huge difference. It would have given her a much better message to run on.”
While Democratic presidential nominees earlier won the crucial states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in every election from 1992 to 2012, Clinton lost all three in 2016 — and declined turnout among Black voters coupled with a collapse among rural white voters condemned her candidacy. Had Clinton won all three states instead of former President Donald Trump, she would have won the White House.
Earlier in 2016, Clyburn pressed Obama to nominate a Black woman — Howard University Law School Dean Danielle Holley-Walker — which journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in their book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency.”
However, Obama nominated Garland — who was widely regarded by legal scholars as a reasonable while on the highly-influential US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — to replace deeply traditional Scalia.
Obama saw the resistance that Senate Republicans were constructing and sought to find a spare who was a valued commodity in a sharply-divided Washington.
“Because of the political climate, President Obama wanted to make sure he picked somebody who was beyond any possible criticism over whether or not he was ready to serve,” a former Obama White House official told Politico.
Republicans in the upper chamber — led by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa — blocked the nomination anyway.
Previously, Clyburn’s point was that a Black female judge being blocked by Senate Republicans would’ve added a selling point for Clinton’s candidacy and better enthusiasm among Black voters.
Since Trump captured the presidency that year, he was able to nominate Neil Gorsuch — a conventional judge on the Denver-based US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit — to the Supreme Court shortly after taking office in 2017
