President Barack Obama is required by the constitution to nominate a new judge to the US Supreme Court.
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Grassley has offered mixed messages since Scalia’s death on how the Senate should proceed on the vacancy, alternating hardline views on blocking any nominee with comments not ruling out hearings. The Kentucky senator joined several Republicans up for re-election in declaring that Obama should let voters in November weigh in on the direction of the court through their vote for president.
Obama discussed the nomination process in a news conference in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where he hosted members of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations for a two-day summit. President Dwight Eisenhower attended the funeral of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in 1953, but skipped that of Justice Robert Jackson a year later. Eighty-one percent of Democrats believe the Senate vote should happen while Obama is in office, while 81 percent of Republicans think that the vote can (and should) wait until next year under a new president. “There are plenty of judges (who) are on high courts already who have had unanimous support of the Republicans”.
Hours after it was made public that Scalia had died, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block any Obama nominee to replace Scalia from moving forward to a vote.
The former senator from DE also recalled the confirmation process for Scalia’s colleague, Clarence Thomas, in 1991, saying that Democrats could have filibustered against his nomination. He added: “The American people are going to make them pay if they jerk the President around on this”.
Blumenthal said that in CT, “I find outrage against shutting down the Supreme Court is motivated by the same feelings about shutting down the government (in 2013)”.
Speaking about the nomination for the first time since hearing of Scalia’s death Saturday, Obama prefaced his remarks by reiterating his condolences to the Scalia family. Steven Rattner, who led a White House task force on the auto industry under Obama, sent out a tweet accompanied with a headline declaring the president was not attending the funeral.
“The president doesn’t think that that’s appropriate, and in fact, what the president thinks is appropriate is respectfully paying tribute to high-profile patriotic American citizens even when you don’t agree on all the issues”, he said.
“Given the choice on the other side of the aisle, and the problem secretary Clinton is having…and the surge we see of somebody like Bernie Sanders, a self-acknowledged socialists, I would say there’s a lot of churning on both sides”, he said. President Obama, they declare, has every right to nominate a successor to Antonin Scalia, even in the final months of his presidency; and the Republican Senate has every obligation to confirm his appointment. In the past, lawmakers have sometimes informally agreed to halt hearings on lower court nominations during campaign season.
If Republicans seem seriously amenable to holding confirmation hearings, Mr. Obama would have greater reason to name a “consensus candidate”, a moderate nominee that Republicans would be hard-pressed to reject.
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“Scalia is the leading exponent of what has become the most common version of what used to be original intent of the Constitution”, said Rogers Smith, a political science professor and associate dean for social sciences at Penn.
