Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died, setting up a major political showdown between President Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled Senate over who will replace him just months before a presidential election.
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White House spokesman Eric Schultz says Obama spoke with the younger Scalia on Saturday evening to offer sympathies on behalf of the Obama family and the country. A cause of death was not immediately reported.
According to the San Antonio News-Express, which was first to report his death, Scalia was found dead in his room at a West Texas resort.
Sanders said he had one litmus test for anyone he would potentially nominate to serve on the Supreme Court – that the new justice would overturn the Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled corporations or unions could spend unlimited amounts of money to support or denounce candidates in elections.
Scalia has provided a crucial fifth vote in a series of 5-4 decisions that have taken the high court in a conservative direction. For current cases pending before the court, if there is a 4-4 tie the lower court ruling is affirmed without establishing precedent.
Obama said he would nominate a successor “in due time”, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) believes the next president should make the call.
That raises the importance of parties nominating a strong presidential candidate – one who cannot only win, but also help elect his or her party’s Senate candidates down the ticket. The Senate’s top Democrat, Harry Reid, says it would be “unprecedented in recent history” for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacancy and urged Obama to send the Senate a nominee right away. Texas has a stake in the outcome.
In early March, the court will hear arguments in an abortion case from Texas that was expected to decide whether states can adopt stringent medical regulations which shut down most or all abortion clinics.
In the most basic sense, there are myriad critical cases now before the Supreme Court where it seemed the justices might have split five to four.
Scalia was a staunch Catholic and a defender of religious freedom on the nation’s high court. That balance has been upset.
Cruz’s comments came after Todd asked whether president Obama – who still has about a year left in office – should be allowed to choose the next Supreme Court justice.
“The fact of the matter is that it’s been standard practice over the last almost 80 years that Supreme Court nominees are not nominated and confirmed during a presidential election year”, said Sen. “I do not like scruffy people who burn the American flag”, he said in 2002, but “regrettably, the First Amendment gives them the right to do that”.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is stopping the process before it even starts. Because values change, legislatures abolish the death penalty, permit same-sex marriage if they want, abolish laws against homosexual conduct. “If you’re an immigration advocate you may chances of the President being able to implement his deferred (immigration )action, the chances have gone up somewhat”, Foster said. Abortion, gun rights, and campaign finance are perennial issues. “A lion of American law has left the stage, and it is up to all of us – every American – to keep our national constitutional dialogue as lively and as learned as he left it”. “They are bigger than any one party, they are about our democracy”. He also advocated tirelessly in favor of originalism, the method of constitutional interpretation that looks to the meaning of words and concepts as they were understood by the Founding Fathers.
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Appointed by Democratic presidents, associate justices Mrs Ginsburg, 82, Sonia Sotomayor, 61, Stephen Breyer, 77, and Elena Kagan, 55, make up the court’s liberal wing. Watford, an African-American, served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from 1995 to 1996.
