It took Obama 26 days to nominate Sonia Sotomayor after David Souter announced his retirement, and 30 days to nominate Elena Kagan after John Paul Stevens said he was retiring.
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Republican White House hopefuls insisted that President Barack Obama step aside and allow his successor to nominate the next Supreme Court justice, in a raucous Saturday night debate that also featured harshly personal jousting over immigration and foreign policy.
With a half-dozen or more major cases and the ideological tilt of the court in the balance, Obama said he pIanned “to fulfill my constitutional responsibility to nominate a successor in due time”.
It also comes at a time when the Court is expected to hear several cases with huge political implications, including on abortion and affirmative action.
“Justice Scalia is one of the most consequential figures in our nation’s history, and his passing is a loss for the Court, the conservative movement, and the country”.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia addresses an audience at Rhodes College, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015 in Memphis, Tenn.
“We have a battle over the president and now we have a new battle superimposed over that for a nominee to the Supreme Court”, said MSU-Denver Professor of Political Science Norman Provizer.
Clinton says Republicans calling for the seat to remain vacant until the next president enters office “dishonor our Constitution”.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he fully expects Obama to try to nominate a replacement for Scalia but says that it’s up to Congress to “delay, delay, delay”.
Likewise, Obama’s plan to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation would stay on hold, because that was the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A confirmation process often takes more than two months, but could be drawn out longer by the Republican-led Senate.
This puts the Democratic White House on a crash course with a Republican-controlled Senate that is no doubt hellbent on making sure any confirmation fight drags on until the president leaves office in January 2017. CBS’s Dickerson quickly challenged the statement. “We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that will strike down every restriction on abortion adopted by the states”, he said.
“Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities”, Reid added.
Democrats pointed out that Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in an election year – 1988 – the final year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He was nominated in November 1987.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz sparred with moderator John Dickerson over whether or not a Supreme Court nominee had been confirmed in a presidential election year before.
Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “The Supreme Court of the United States is too important to our democracy for it to be understaffed for partisan reasons”.
“I was told it was this morning”, Biery said of Scalia’s death.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at 79 today at Cibolo Creek Ranch, in Texas.
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“As liberals and conservatives alike would agree, through his powerful and persuasive opinions, Justice Scalia fundamentally changed how courts interpret the Constitution and statutes, returning the focus to the original meaning of the text after decades of judicial activism”, Cruz said.
