Conservatives plan $10M ad campaign to back Trump’s Supreme Court nominee
The conservative Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) is planning to launch a $10 million national ad campaign to push Democratic senators to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
JCN said it’s planning to air ads in states that have vulnerable Democrats up for re-election in 2018, particularly those where Trump won by large margins.
Senate Democrats have vowed to fight back against any Trump pick that they see as too conservative.
“We are not going to settle on a Supreme Court nominee,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week in an interview on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
{mosads}”If they don’t appoint someone who’s really good, we’re gonna oppose him tooth and nail.”
In a statement, Carrie Severino, JCN’s chief counsel and policy director, said any senator who signs up for Schumer’s “obstructionist strategy will pay a heavy price in 2018.”
“We are preparing to launch the most robust campaign for a Supreme Court nominee in history and we will force vulnerable Senators up for re-election in 2018 like Joe Donnelly and Claire McCaskill to decide between keeping their Senate seats or following Chuck Schumer’s liberal, obstructionist agenda,” she said.
JCN spent $500,000 on post-election TV and digital ads in Washington, D.C., New York City and South Florida in December to thank Trump for promising to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a conservative justice.
Trump has pledged to nominate a judge “very much in the mold” of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death last year left the current vacancy. In an unprecedented move, Trump created a list of potential nominees during his presidential campaign, earning him Republican support.
In December, he reportedly told Fox News that he’s narrowed his list of 11 names down to three or four people.
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