Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made a similar statement, saying that “it only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court justice”. As noted political journalist Robert Draper has reported, that evening top Republican lawmakers and strategists gathered in Washington and plotted how to torpedo Obama’s presidency from the get-go.
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The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has put the U.S. Supreme Court at the center of the 2016 election maelstrom and only the Senate can stop the vortex before real damage is done. And this may be his last chance to do anything before November: McConnell could keep the Senate in pro forma sessions for months, even if no legislative work is being done, only committee work, but that hasn’t stopped Obama before. McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said the GOP leader “would have more to say” when the president submits his pick.
Now, if the court flips to a liberal majority, Forsythe foresees a large scale rolling back of decades of abortion restrictions. For the first time in 214 years, they have changed the Senate’s “advise and consent” responsibilities to ‘advise and obstruct.’…
The White House declined to give a more specific timeline for Obama to announce his nominee. That would mean an open court seat for almost a year, until at least January 2017. That would endanger the G.O.P. nominee and the seven G.O.P. incumbents who are up for reelection this year in states Obama carried in 2012. That was a presidential election year.
Republicans are defending seven seats in Florida, Illinois, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Only two of those GOP senators, Florida’s Marco Rubio and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, have so far embraced McConnell’s call to postpone the nomination process. If the Supreme Court deadlocks on that case, the states challenging the president would win – and his executive orders would be declared unconstitutional.
The practical effect for the unions of an adverse decision would have been a reduction of their dues income and perhaps a diminution of their dominance of California’s state and local politics. The conservative base reviles the thought of a Democratic president picking the successor of a conservative justice. But Shelby faces only a March 1 primary challenge from the right.
A procession of law enforcement officers early Sunday escorted the body of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to a funeral home in El Paso, Texas, where officials are waiting to hear whether an autopsy will be performed.
Much of this year’s presidential campaign has been animated by the sentiment that both political parties are broken with few significant differences between them.
Wallace asked again, “But hasn’t it gone through your mind ‘That if I retire, I’d like to see…’ You talk about Republicans appointing one kind of justice and Democrats another”. “Our role in the Senate is to evaluate the nominee’s temperament, intellect, experience, integrity, and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law”. The fight will only intensify if the nominee is a woman or a minority, or both.
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Senate Republicans don’t hold all the cards here.
