Nominee Quotes

#1. Coming to terms with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is like being told you have Stage 1 or Stage 2 cancer. You know you'll probably survive, but one way or the other, there's going to be a lot of throwing up.

Christopher Buckley

#2. Lion Capital also nominated one of its founding partners, Lyndon Lea, to American Apparel's board in place of another nominee, Gene Montesano, the founder of Lucky Brand Jeans, whose name the hedge fund is withdrawing.

Anonymous

#3. Experts are saying that President Bush's goal now is to politically humiliate Saddam Hussein. Why don't we just make him the next Democratic presidential nominee?

Jay Leno

#4. By definition, the person who learns enough to become the nominee is almost certainly the best person for the general election.

Newt Gingrich

#5. I think we should have the majority of the party's voters decide who they want as their nominee.

Mitt Romney

#6. It's been 80 years since the Senate has confirmed a Supreme Court nominee who was nominated during an election. And particularly when the court hangs in the balance, it makes no sense whatsoever to give Barack Obama the power to jam through a judge in the final election year.

Ted Cruz

#7. Having been heavily involved in the planning of a couple of G.O.P. conventions, my view is, we should just scrap 'em. Cancel 'em. Just figure out an appropriate forum for the nominee to give an acceptance speech and be done with it.

Mark McKinnon

#8. So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

Michael Beschloss

#9. I'm an Oscar nominee. I love saying that. Whatever happens, I'm going to sing that 'I'm an Oscar nominee' part.

Octavia Spencer

#10. The former secretary of State is the nominee. She is also the Willie Sutton of classified data. And there is going to be a long-term effort of Republicans, whether it's Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, to paint her into the corner.

Hugh Hewitt

#11. It's always an uphill battle to defeat a Supreme Court nominee, but this is a fight worth having.

Kim Gandy

#12. I think Donald Trump is now kind of in love with the idea of becoming president of the United States. I think he truly does believe that he can be the Republican nominee.

Rachel Maddow

#13. With two years till the nomination, both [Joe] Biden and [Hillary] Clinton are positioning themselves to be the Democratic nominee. And are they stressing their experience, their ideas, their excellent hair? No. They've been talking about their poverty.

Peter Sagal

#14. Whether it's before the election or after the election, the principle is the American people are choosing their next president and their next president should pick this Supreme Court nominee.

Mitch McConnell

#15. In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.

David Pietrusza

#16. The vote by the Judiciary Committee reflects the fact that John Roberts is an exceptional nominee with a conservative judicial philosophy - a philosophy that represents mainstream America.

Jay Alan Sekulow

#17. A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone. Ah, those were the good ol' days.

George W. Bush

#18. No senator's vote, except for the declaration of war or the authorization for the use of force, is more important than the confirmation of a nominee for the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment.

Arlen Specter

#19. Voting for a candidate for the DC circuit is very different from confirming someone to the US Supreme Court. I have been very clear that the Senate should not confirm any nominee in a lame duck session.

Ted Cruz

#20. Do not tell somebody how to vote, just go up to them and tell them what Fahrenheit 9/11 meant to you. Fahrenheit will probably not win an Academy Award, but if you put it first on your list, it will become a nominee.

Valerie Harper

#21. The one person whom I would like to be is Meryl Streep. Even at her age, she sits alongside the younger heroines at the Oscars with her name in the nominee list, and others around her wonder whether they still stand a chance.

Rani Mukerji

#22. When you're the presidential nominee you get to pick whomever you choose to be on the ticket, and that person gets to say yes or no because, obviously, it's a very important decision.

Hillary Clinton

#23. No secular state ever existed and none would exist until the end of the French Revolution, and so we understand that America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and we believe that this nominee is going to see to it that those truths are upheld.

Rod Parsley

#24. America deserves a nominee who reveres the law, not one whose service on the bench is conditioned on political promises.

John Cornyn

#25. What I can tell you is I'm not running for president. I'm not going to run for president. I'm going to support one of these four people to be our nominee. I'm supporting three of them right now. And that means that we're going to get one of those people as our nominee.

Mitt Romney

#26. Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism.

Newt Gingrich

#27. The question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children?

Tom Coburn

#28. We have never had a president of the United States or a nominee of a major party who was a Supreme Court law clerk.

Jeffrey Toobin

#29. No judicial nomination should answer any question that is designed to reveal how the nominee will rule on any issue that could come before the court.

Jon Kyl

#30. If the president comes forward with a strong, qualified nominee, if he, you know, addresses the agenda, if he takes actions, including dealing with perhaps some personnel decisions, I think that people will show that he is moving forward and doing the right thing for our country.

Trent Lott

#31. If any Republican nominee wants to run on the idea that borrowing money and printing it up and sending it to foreign countries that often hate us and burn our flag and think it's a good idea, feel free to run on that issue. But it's not really popular with the people.

Rand Paul

#32. There is a big risk for the Republicans in a race, especially with Hillary Clinton as a likely Democratic nominee in a contest that will focus on the possibility of the first woman president to be six months suspending up the nomination of a black woman, who is imminently qualified.

Barack Obama

#33. Judicial excellence requires candor before confirmation. We are being asked to give the nominee enormous power.

Herb Kohl

#34. I think if you're at home and you don't want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, then the only candidate who can beat Donald is our campaign. And so I would encourage, even if you like another candidate, stand with us if you don't want Donald to be the nominee.

Ted Cruz

#35. Marco Rubio is interesting because he checks so many boxes when you think about what a Republican nominee needs. He brings Florida, he's young, he's Hispanic, the Tea Party likes him. But that said, he's got issues, actually surprisingly, ironically, with Mexican-American voters.

Mark McKinnon

#36. We have to respect that any nominee to the Supreme Court would have to defer any comments on any matters, which are either before the court or very likely to be before the court.

Edward Kennedy

#37. The media coverage for Donald Trump has been almost cheerleading. I'm convinced it's because many in the press want him to be the nominee.

Marco Rubio

#38. Seats on the [Court] bench are not reserved for causes or interests. They're given to those who will uphold the rule of law so long as the nominee is well-qualified to interpret and apply the law.

Sam Brownback

#39. Let me put it very plainly: If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.

Mitt Romney

#40. Let me just say the rules are what they are in the Republican Party. You have to have X-number of delegates in order to be the nominee. And if you don't have those number of delegates, then there's a process in place.Here is what would be a calamity, for Donald Trump to become our nominee.

Marco Rubio

#41. Barack Obama's class warfare will not work on this Republican nominee. Not in Utah.

Mia Love

#42. We call on the Senate to reject any judicial nominee who does not affirm fundamental civil rights, including a woman's right [to obtain an abortion on demand]. The threat an [pro-life] judiciary poses to women's lives demands nothing less.

Susana Martinez

#43. I am still doing my due diligence. A vote on a Supreme Court nominee is a lifetime appointment and when the court decides, it is the law of the land.

Bob Menendez

#44. Thanks to you, we've reached a milestone. The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nominee.

Hillary Clinton

#45. My nominee for Best Picture of the year - maybe the best picture ever, because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies - is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.'

Jerry Saltz

#46. I will only vote to confirm a nominee for attorney general who is truly independent and who will guarantee reforms that restore and uphold the Constitution.

Christopher Dodd

#47. Let me just be very clear that the Republican Party will select a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton.

Dan Quayle

#48. A nominee [to Supreme Court] must possess the competence, character and temperament to serve on the bench.

Herb Kohl

#49. President Bush said yesterday that it was appropriate for the White House to invoke Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers's religion in making the case for her to skeptical conservatives, triggering a debate over what role, if any, her evangelical faith should play in the confirmation battle.

Peter Baker

#50. Whenever a president nominates somebody to a high-profile post, there is always the risk that some skeleton, real or imagined, will emerge from the nominee's closet and doom the whole enterprise.

Timothy Noah

#51. After months and months at the top of the polls, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump could be the nominee.

Mara Liasson

#52. Every presidential nominee says his vice president will be given a serious, important role in his new administration. But it almost never materializes. A strong, totally self-centered politician like Tom Dewey sharing his hard-won power with a vice president? Don't count on it.' - David Brinkley

David Pietrusza

#53. The White House said today that Judge Clarence Thomas, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, had smoked marijuana while in college.

Clarence Thomas

#54. What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really 'empathy' and 'understanding.' He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice.

Karl Rove

#55. Judicial excellence means that a Supreme Court justice must have a sense of the values from which our core of our political- economic system goes. In other words, we should not approve any nominee whose extreme judicial philosophy would undermine rights and liberties relied upon by all Americans.

Herb Kohl

#56. Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

Robert Dallek

#57. Sen. Frist has every right, and indeed the duty, to see that every presidential nominee for the Federal bench at every level gets an up or down vote.

John Jay Hooker

#58. How should we Democrats select the next presidential nominee? Smoke filled rooms? Brokered convention? National primary? Personally, I prefer jump shots from the top of the key.

Bill Bradley

#59. John Kerry will be the Democratic nominee for president. Democrats finally found someone who is Al Gore without the flash and the sizzle.

Craig Kilborn

#60. One of the problems we saw in the last presidential election in our party is that our nominee, while winning the election, which we ought never to forget, often lost sight of the difference between strategy and tactics.

Paul Begala

#61. And the president is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn't say that. The Constitution doesn't say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn't have to even be a vote.

Robert Byrd

#62. Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

Tom Brokaw

#63. On the political side, I was the Democratic nominee for the Governor of Tennessee in 1970 and 1998.

John Jay Hooker

#64. Will a nominee embrace and uphold the essential meaning of the four words inscribed above the entrance of the Supreme Court building: Equal justice under law?

Edward Kennedy

#65. I think Senator [Ted] Cruz's strategy is that there's 4.5 million, 5 million Republicans that didn't vote in 2012. This is the conventional wisdom and they didn't vote because they didn't like the nominee, wasn't conservative enough, or there was a religious component. Who knows what?

Rush Limbaugh

#66. I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.

Michael Eric Dyson

#67. We've got another nominee coming up, well qualified, Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owens has a tremendous reputation, tremendous record, but they are already marshalling their forces to try to stop that nomination.

Jay Alan Sekulow

#68. I want to say with the utmost of sincerity, not as a Republican, but as an American, that I have great respect for Senator Obama's historic achievement to become his party's nominee, not because of his color, but with indifference to it.

Mike Huckabee

#69. It is highly likely that one of the two of them [ Donald Trump and Ted Cruz ] is going to be the nominee. This is a - look here, what is this - what this is really is a prescription for remaking the Republican Party.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#70. We work for the public, and I believe that if a senator wants to block a piece of legislation or a nominee, they owe the public an explanation.

Claire McCaskill

#71. The whole Republican establishment has united to destroy his bid to be the nominee of the Republican Party.

Louis Farrakhan

#72. There is no doubt in my view that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Geraldo Rivera

#73. I saw a Harry Reid statement saying, there's nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to act on any presidential nominee. Well, that was back when President Bush was president and vice versa. So this is not a pretty carrying-on at the moment.

Nina Totenberg

#74. Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee, because we are not going to allow - people will wake up and we're not going to allow a con artist to take over the party of [Abraham] Lincoln and [Ronald] Reagan.

Marco Rubio

#75. Republicans are taking the possibility of [Donald] Trump as nominee seriously enough that the committee that oversees next year's Senate races laid out a confidential seven-page blueprint for candidates on how to run with Trump at the top of the ticket.

Dalia Mogahed

#76. The Supreme Court would benefit from the addition of a justice who has real experience as a practicing lawyer. The current justices have all been chosen from the lower federal courts. A nominee with relevant non-judicial experience would bring a different and useful perspective to the court.

Harry Reid

#77. Hillary Clinton is now poised to become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, but she simply lacks the integrity and temperament to serve in the office.

Gary J. Byrne

#78. I write to withdraw as a nominee to serve as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States ... I am concerned that the confirmation process presents a burden for the White House and our staff that is not in the best interest of the country.

Harriet Miers

#79. When you see all that rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentleman, I'd follow the example of their nominee; don't inhale.

Ronald Reagan

#80. Remember, the political idea being expressed a year ago was that because the GOP interpreted its 1994 mandate as a call to budget-balancing austerity, the electorate would never give the White House to the GOP if its nominee was also a root-canal austerian.

Jude Wanniski

#81. With so many of our fundamental rights hanging in the balance, it is not good enough to simply roll the dice, hoping a nominee has changed his past views. It's not good enough to think, 'This is the best we can expect from this president'.

Barbara Boxer

#82. [Ted] Cruz is not at all popular in the Senate. Republicans say he may be too disliked to be a nominee. And there is a real concern about that. I think the one way to go after Trump maybe is go after him as a closet Democrat. That he has supported Democrats in the past.

Dalia Mogahed

#83. The nominee is Mitt Romney. Paul Ryan joins Mitt Romney. The budget plan, the approach on Medicare and all of that is going to be the Romney plan. What he has is a man as his number two who understands the details of budgets, who has demonstrated a willingness to take on tough issues.

John Sununu

#84. The team behind 'The Lego Movie' approached me. They wanted to do something extra special for the Academy Award performance of best song nominee 'Everything is Awesome.' They had seen my earlier version of a Lego Oscar statue, and I was happy to take on the challenge.

Nathan Sawaya

#85. Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#86. You know, winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification, or a sign, of who can win the general election. If it were, every nominee would win, because every nominee wins Democratic primaries.

Mark Penn

#87. If I'm the nominee, I will pledge I will not run as an independent. I want to win as the Republican. I want to run as the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump

#88. This country is facing an economy that has been radically transformed.And these changes have been disruptive. They have changed people's lives. The jobs that once sustained our middle class, they either don't pay enough or they are gone, and we need someone that understands that as our nominee.

Marco Rubio

#89. I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.

Patrick Marber

#90. If Donald Trump is our nominee, it could be the end of the Republican Party. It will split us and splinter us in a way that we may never be able to recover. And the Democrats will be joyful about it. It's not going to happen.

Marco Rubio

#91. As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

John Podhoretz

#92. Supreme Court nominations are an occasion to pause and reflect on the values that make our nation strong, just and fair. And we must determine whether a nominee has a demonstrated commitment to those basic values.

Edward Kennedy

#93. If I am the nominee, I will not run as an Independent.

Donald Trump

#94. If Satan were twins, one the Republican nominee for president, the other the nominee of the Democrats, and God ran as an independent, can there be any doubt who would come in last?

Dee Hock

#95. Any successful nominee should possess both the temperament to interpret the law and the wisdom to do so fairly. The next Supreme Court Justice should have a record of protecting individual rights and a strong willingness to put aside any political agenda.

Bennie Thompson

#96. There will be that zip-a-dee-doo-dah after the nominee is chosen. I guarantee there will be that enthusiasm. But to be brutally honest, with all due respect to governor Romney, who is obviously the frontrunner ... hes not garnering a lot of that enthusiasm right now.

Sarah Palin

#97. We must use a judicial, rather than a political, standard to evaluate [a nominee's] fitness for the Supreme Court. That standard must be based on the fundamental principle that judges interpret and apply but do not make law.

Orrin Hatch

#98. In the summer of 1952, when I was 30, the Army assigned me to an infantry unit fighting in Korea. Meanwhile, though, there was other news in my family: My father had become the Republican presidential nominee. As an ambitious young major, I refused any offers for other assignments.

John Eisenhower

#99. The Oscars are a lot different when you are a nominee. You walk around with this big smile on your face, and everyone, even people who work for rival film companies, tells you they voted for you.

Samuel Goldwyn

#100. There was a time in my life when election year was nothing to me, but in 1912, I joined that great army of Americans who drop a stitch in their routine every four years, and give themselves up to backing first a candidate for the nomination and afterwards a nominee.

Margaret Case Harriman