i respect meric garland. i have never said a bad thing about him. i have deep respect for his character. he's a judicial liberal and would transform the court, but i'm not going to say anything bad about meric garland, the man or the judge. that said, the republicans announced their strategy from the very beginning and i do think that judge garland would not have been nominated but for the announcement of that strategy in the first place. it was impossible once you adopt that strategy to walk away from it. that would have been political suicide. i think the strategy was the right one. obviously it paid off or seems to have paid off bigger than most people expected, but i think it was entirely foreseeable and i again dare say that democrats would have done exactly the same thing because this has been baked into the process now for 25 years. >> carolyn i see from your body language there are many things you want to respond to. >> first of all, i think we need to put some actual facts on the table. real facts about what has happened. ever since the sen

. >> theasast pa of f clate anange icleaearlseen o o meric's coas, hard t by rising sea levels, flooding, and severe storm surges. >> what we see is the united stateses, the eastern part o ofe united states from the gulf of mexico all the way up to new england is among the highest local sea level rise rates in the world. >> more people live on the coasts than ever before. and now that we have more pplple in harm' w way, viououslwhen a a storm doeststrikethee consequenceare evemomore dir >>>> there is a ton o of coastle in amamerica. we e have sometetg like 94,000 miles of coastline, 60,000 miles of coastal roads. half of america lives within a coastal watershed coununty, very clolose to the coast. so, we are a astal cnntry,f yoyou ll. what climate change is gonna do, the most important impact to coastal areas is gonna come through sea level rise. and that means that coastal flooding gets worse, coastal erosion gets worse, we'rere gon seeee coastal ars s inunted.d. and in ctct, thimpoportt thinin is, this is t t someing g abt the futureit'already hapnining n. vivirgia beaea, miami, new or

so to answer one of your questions, i do think the experience of last year, which included meric garland, but there were many other unique things about what happened with regard to the confirmation think that is going to have an impact on how people consider supreme court nominees going forward. it really was something that i never would have predicted. i have worked for the senator for more than 14 years and i think even he, the most senior senator serving in the u.s. senate, was surprised at all the different things that happened in 2016, one of which was the majority leader announcing that no consideration would be given to the president's nominee to the supreme court. so of the four that went through, there were some unpredictable moments. i wouldn't say that any supreme court process is necessarily predictable. these are real people who have interesting backgrounds. there's a lot of attention and more and more so there's a lot of money that gets involved in groups for and against. each senator has his or her own standard and approach to how they consider nominees to the lower courts