Orrin Hatch very disturbed his lunch was disrupted by Supreme Court protesters

By Joan McCarter  

Monday Mar 28, 2016 · 12:34 PM EST

Those radical hippies who think that the Senate should hold confirmation hearings on a new Supreme Court justice after a sitting one dies have gone too far for Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. They interrupted his lunch, he writes in an op-ed for Bloomberg. And they had signs.

Recently, I was invited by a well-respected legal organization to speak at their monthly lunch meeting. As a group of 200 Washington-area lawyers sat eating in a packed Chinatown restaurant, I began to share my thoughts regarding the current vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the untimely death of my friend, Justice Antonin Scalia.  

Midway through my remarks, a group of protesters rose from their seats near the front of the room and began shouting “Do your Job!” As these disrupters stood chanting and holding professionally printed signs, it reinforced my belief that by deferring the confirmation process until after this toxic election season, the Senate is doing exactly what it should: We are doing our job.

This was all so disturbing that the very senior senator from Utah was compelled to write some more, this time in The New York Times, about how this simple unprecedented blockade by Republicans of a Supreme Court nominee has been turned into a totally political thing by Democrats. Republicans simply wanted to let the people decide, see? Because the overwhelming decision of the people in 2012 to have Barack Obama for president for four more years doesn't count.

The only thing that counts, Hatch says, is that Democrats were mean to Robert Bork and then retaliated by changing filibuster rules when Republicans were doing their totally non-political blockade of almost all of President Obama's judicial nominees. There are people with "professionally printed signs" now, which just demonstrates that "Democrats have no credibility in lecturing Republicans on how to conduct the current confirmation process" because "liberal pressure tactics belie any commitment to keeping politics out of the confirmation process."

And, of course, there's not a smidgeon of politics in the Republican blockade. The millions being spent by far-right groups to intimidate Republicans and smear the nominee proves it.

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