“‘I have hopes that President Obama will at least try to appoint somebody who will get a huge bipartisan vote, and if he will, he’s going to go down in history as a better president,’ said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. ‘If he doesn’t, there’s going to be a whale of a fight if he appoints an activist to the court. That’s not good for him, it’s not good for the Senate, it’s not good for the country.’

“Looking toward the hearings, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, ‘Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an evenhanded reading of the law.”

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“Jon Kyl, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, played down the likelihood and said it would require an extraordinary circumstance.

“‘It is unlikely that there would be a filibuster, except if there is an extraordinary circumstance,’ Kyl told ABC’s “This Week” program. ‘I’m not going to take it off the table. But I think it can easily be avoided.’…

“‘If the president picks someone from the fringe instead of from the middle, or if he picks someone who will apply their feelings instead of applying the law, then that might be an extraordinary case,’ Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said on ‘Fox News Sunday.'”

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“‘We need to do our due diligence, and we need to probably bend over backwards both in appearance and in reality to give the nominee a fair process,’ said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee…

“‘We will all be laughed at — including laughed at by Republican senators — by raising the war cries too loud and too early, when in fact the senators will not deliver what we are promising,’ said Manuel Miranda of the Third Branch Network, who organizes regular conference calls of like-minded conservatives about judicial nominations. Instead, he said, conservatives should take a more ‘modest’ and ‘measured’ approach at first.

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Via the Right Scoop.