Posted on 02/15/2016 2:57:44 PM PST by Innovative
Under typical circumstances, this wouldn't be such a big deal. But Scalia, the court's most influential conservative, died in President Obama's final year in office, in the middle of the court's term, with the candidates to succeed him fighting through the early primary season.
That makes this high court vacancy particularly complicated — and divisive.
Almost immediately after Scalia's death became public, Obama announced his intention to nominate a successor himself.
All but one of the the six Republican presidential candidates at Saturday's GOP debate in South Carolina said Obama should either not nominate a justice and leave the decision for the next president, or the Senate should block any pick.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and other top Democrats want their Republican colleagues, who control the Senate and wield enough votes to scuttle Obama's nomination, to pledge to confirm a new nominee before the president leaves office.
But Republicans say there's no way that will happen.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Republicans in the Senate should stay firm and not allow this.
“Under typical circumstances, this wouldn’t be such a big deal.”
I fail to see how picking a SC Justice isn’t a big deal.
Obama will leave the seat open and make a deal with Hillary. He will help her get elected and ensure no indictment against her if she agrees to nominate him for the SCOTUS in January.
What should happen: the next president gets to nominate the next SC judge.
What will happen: in two weeks, the Senate will railroad through some hardcore lib.
Republicans will expect us to hail their bipartisanship.
“I fail to see how picking a SC Justice isn’t a big deal.”
Exactly. That is why Republicans need to stay firm and not allow Obama to Pick the next Justice of the Supreme Court and need to make sure to vote for a R pres. candidate who will beat Hillary or Sanders.
See my sig line below.
The Republican voters who stayed home because they didn’t like Romney, have only themselves to blame. Obama’s the president because of their failure to unite behind the Republican party candidate. Therefore Obama holds power and he has the constitutional right to fill that seat tomorrow. Scream away, friends.
“Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and other top Democrats want their Republican colleagues, who control the Senate and wield enough votes to scuttle Obama’s nomination, to pledge to confirm a new nominee before the president leaves office.”
Bwahahahahahaha. He Harry, remember Robert Bork, you idiot?
Ted Kennedy (D-HELL) led the way. Remember?
History shows that U.S. Presidents were once virtually always given the benefit of the doubt regarding judicial appointments to the federal courts, except in the rare cases of serious ethical questions or dubious qualifications. It was a good system, and the right system, and both parties followed it, realizing that the ideological mix in the courts was fluid and cyclical, and that today’s new conservative judge would eventually be offset by the appointee of the next liberal President, and vice versa.
Democrats destroyed that tradition and accord on judicial appointments when in 1987, the Senate Democrats blocked President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork, who had been selected by President Reagan to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Reagan, it can be argued, lit the fuse by nominating Bork despite warnings by Democrats, in the also traditional “advise†part of the nomination process, that he was not to their liking, and would face more than the usual opposition. But Reagan had been elected in two landslides, and it seemed reasonable for him to claim that the Right had earned the opportunity to have a conservative heavyweight on the Supreme Court.
By any previous standard, Bork was such a heavyweight, and an unusually well-qualified one. Democrats, however, had been spoiled by the long, long tenure of a very liberal Supreme Court majority led by Earl Warren, and the succeeding Burger Court had proven to be surprisingly moderate, in part because several Justices had moved to the left to counter the influx of conservative jurists like William Rehnquist. Judge Bork, however, would be replacing Lewis Powell, one of the Court’s moderates and a frequent swing-vote (much like Justice Kennedy today), and the former Solicitor General had a well-earned reputation for being frighteningly smart, impressively persuasive, and as conservative as they come, all bolstered by impeccable scholarship. The Left feared that Bork would lead a conservative judicial revolution on the scale of the Warren Court’s liberal one—which, by the way, the Republicans and conservatives lived with and survived, though complaining mightily—so Democrats decided to blow up the tradition of reciprocity and comity.
First, the American Bar Association, which then was supposed to render an objective assessment of any nominated judge’s qualifications for the Court, gave Bork a low rating, thus fertilizing the ground for attacks on his nomination. This reflected the strong liberal bias in the ABA, and was, frankly, a disgrace: it violated the spirit of the groups own stated ethical rules by claiming an objectivity in its national assignment that it knew it was incapable of delivering. Then Democratic allies like the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union coordinated with the party to–and there is no other word for it—destroy Bork’s reputation and portray him as a rights-opposing monster, which he was not.
The low point in Bork’s destruction, for which he was understandably unprepared since it had never happened to any nominee of his caliber before, was the vicious calumny spoken by Sen. Ted Kennedy. Its substance can only be defended on the unethical basis that it worked:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy … President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice..â€
“The Republican voters who stayed home because they didn’t like Romney, have only themselves to blame. Obama’s the president because of their failure to unite behind the Republican party candidate. “
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. If only they would learn from their past mistakes, for which we all suffer.
I just remembered—IIRC—DeGaulles’s statement:
The cemeteries are full of “indispensable men.”
Obama’s short list:
Loretta Lynch
Eric Holder
Chuck Schumer
Bill Ayres
“A leading Supreme Court researcher, Tom Goldstein, wrote a column Monday that put Lynch at the top of the list because she was recently vetted and approved by the Senate for her current job. “
Great! :(
This is why Republicans need to stay firm and not allow it.
The GOP’s Worst Nightmare SCOTUS Nominee
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/15/the-gop-s-worst-nightmare-scotus-nominee.html
Tino Cuellar
“But Republicans say there’s no way that will happen.”
And with backbones of mush, we can count on them to block obama, right?
Right???
McConnell has such an outstanding recording backing this kind of resolve...
In my case, I voted for Romney.
Obama has the right to pick a nominee, but the Senate is not obligated to confirm said nominee.
Didn’t George W. Bush pick Miguel Estrada, and the RATS dragged it on for two years, until Estrada withdrew him name?
The GOP can delay, hold hearings, delay some more, and run out the clock until after January 20, 2017. That’s if they have the guts, and that is a big “if.”
“But Republicans say there’s no way that will happen.”
Yea, right.
I fear the Republicans in the Senate are between a rock and a hard place because I believe they will lose the Senate.
The court needs Janice Rogers Brown.
FUDH !
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