“The president is presumably elected by the people to carry out a program and altering the ideological directions of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a presidential platform”.
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President Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday to name an “indisputably” qualified Supreme Court nominee and lashed out at Republicans who he said demand a strict interpretation of the Constitution – except regarding his right to propose a new Justice.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a former Supreme Court clerk and a member of the Judiciary Committee, makes a similar argument: “We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year”.
With a vacancy now remaining on the Supreme Court, the bench is evenly divided with four liberals and four conservative leaning Justices.
In an interview with ABC News, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama would would wait to announce his nominee until Congress returns from its break later this month.
“The theory that the constitutional framers had was that with the lifetime appointment, they would be able to rise above politics”, said David Schultz, a constitutional law expert at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.
“At each pass, they took a hard line”.
Democrats need a net gain of five seats to win back the majority they lost in the 2014 elections.
At least one Asian American has been floated as a potential Supreme Court pick. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders have called on Obama to refrain from nominating a candidate to the nation’s high court as the president winds down his final year in office.
“Memories tend to be short around here sometimes”, he said. Zwillich says it is possible that the president will intentionally pick a moderate, centrist nominee-if he were to do so and Republicans blocked the nominee anyway, the party may wind up appearing radical and unreasonable.
Obama says he will obey the Constitution and nominate a replacement.
Scalia, the court’s leading conservative, died unexpectedly Saturday, prompting a political skirmish over his replacement, both in the Senate and on the presidential campaign trail.
As a result, Schumer said then, he was recommending to his Democratic Senate colleagues “that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances”.
“The president seeks judges who understand that justice is not about some abstract legal theory, or a footnote in a casebook, but it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of peoples’ lives”, Schultz said. The last election-year vote in the senate came in 1988.
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However, Sabato also noted that with the Supreme Court vacancy ascending in importance, it could rally establishment Republicans who now oppose the anti-establishment Trump to support him if he becomes the party’s nominee.
