Sen. Bernie Sanders said that President Barack “Obama’s nominations” to the Supreme Court “required 60 votes.” As CNN’s Jake Tapper explains in this fact-checking video, Obama’s Supreme Court nominees received 60 votes, but it wasn’t “required.”
A confirmation vote for a Supreme Court nominee requires only a simple majority, or 51 votes. But it takes three-fifths of the full Senate, or 60 votes, to end a filibuster, and there was no attempt to filibuster the two Supreme Court justices appointed by Obama.
Sanders made the claim in a Feb. 5 interview with Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” which worked with FactCheck.org on the video. See our previous collaborations here.