Chuck Todd asked Trump this morning if he had a litmus test, and he clearly didn’t understand the question. Basically all he knew was that he wanted, “another guy like Scalia.”
Democrats are in the driver’s seat at least until November.
Between now and then I see Obama nominating in a few weeks (maybe a month, depending on how long flags are at half-mast). That nominee will be, I suspect, reliably of a mind that the Constitution is a living document.
The Senate will drag its feet on hearings and on a vote (probably both) and by summer will still plead “we don’t have enough information.”
Right before summer recess, Obama will play his best card, “vote up-or-down on my nominee or I will withdraw.”
The Senate will acquiesce, vote down the nominee and recess for the summer to go campaign. Two weeks later the president will offer a second nominee, telling the American people, “the Highest Court of this Great Land has never been without a sitting justice for this long. It is because Republicans do not take their roles seriously that we are in this mess.”
Republicans will be forced to stay in continuous session at election time or consider Obama’s second nominee. The second nominee will be more centrist with less pedigree in their jurisprudence. Hearings will be quickly held and a vote will be taken before election day and the second nominee will be confirmed with between 5 and 12 senators in secure or toss-up seats being allowed to “vote their conscience.”
Bernie might be more electable than Hillary, but no one knows that–including you and these polls. Polls done before someone is actually nominated are not that important. This is 1940s era thinking that “minds don’t get changed throughout the election season” that lead to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman Rhetoric.”
Hillary has been the target of persistent Republican attacks for about 20 years. I’d argue with Hillary the impacts of all possible negatives for her are “baked in” to her numbers. Bernie is rarely the target of any Republican so far, if he wins the nomination that will change overnight. Polling has shown that “socialist” is the worst possible descriptor in the eyes of the voters, even worse than “atheist” and Bernie is essentially an atheist as well, and will be called one as the nominee–a socialist godless man who will raise taxes on middle income families by 10% or more–and unlike most Republican attack ads that’s essentially 100% true, which makes it even more effective.
Bernie could be more electable than Hillary, but until he’s been through the crucible there’s no reason to say that–Hillary already has.
I believe this will be shown to be true, but the hardcore conservative Republicans believe there are “vast legions of true conservative voters” that have never come to the polls because the party keeps nominating wish-washy Rinos like Romney and Bush. That’s why part of me hopes Cruz wins the nomination so this theory can be disproven.
Don’t overestimate the potential for 4-4 deadlocks. The large majority of SCOTUS cases are decided by more than one vote.
With Scalia’s passing, presumably the only 4-4 case rulings would be those where he would have been in the majority. The biggest headline cases of recent years - Obergefell v. Hodges, King v. Burwell, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius - would all have had the same outcome had the court been short Scalia.
The Freepers are consistent in their total ignorance of everything.
Trumpies, no doubt.
What gets me is that some Freepers in that thread are still calling Obama “the Usurper.” 
You and the GOP apparently need to learn the same lesson: Once you get people angry to the point of irrationality over an issue they think really matters, that anger doesn’t go away. It festers until it can find some kind of outlet, and it is difficult to control.
The following are all the reasons that Obama has for nominating Cruz:
Obama and the rest of the Senate don’t want a recess appointment.
It can happen, but won’t.
A recess appointment would mean the Republicans have not maintained control of their house. In other words, reelection has become most important. And although reelection is the most import arrow in a successful politician’s quiver, they don’t want us to know that.
For my money, the single biggest case of the past decade has been the destruction of the Voting Rights Act. It’s paved the way for some serious shenanigans where I live. Scalia made it possible.
Citizens United, the second most important case of the past decade, was also made possible by Scalia.
Don’t underestimate the value of his absence.
Previously:
Take any discussion of Sanders’s chance to be elected to a new/sepaarate thred.
[ /Moderating ]
So we are supposed to start a new thread on the impact of Scalia’s death insofar as it relates to the salience of Sanders electability? Or we can talk about the salience but not discuss his electability more generally?
Scalia was a “social engineering, activist judge,” wasn’t he? I can see picking another in that vein, just more Thurgood Marshall than Nino Scalia this time.
What? 
But, I still don’t get it. Obama, after winning two national elections, is still “the Usurper”?! Is this based on Birtherism, or some theory even weirder?!
Scalia wasn’t an activist, he had an actual judicial philosophy which was so compelling that it’s now accepted doctrine among even many liberal jurists.
An activist judge is one who decides where they want to come out and work backwards from there to justify the decision. To Scalia, the process mattered. To William Brennan, the outcome was what mattered.
Hello, Bush v. Gore?
My point is, Birtherism is enough. The core of the Birther delusion is the idea that this person managed to steal a Presidential election through a massive cover-up about his origins which effectively circumvented the Constitutional rules about who is eligible to become President. If you honestly believed that that happened and that nobody in power was doing anything about it, you’d have a legitimate reason to be angry and to demand action. All of the other lies they’ve been fed just make them angrier.
It’s possible a nontrivial number of them believe one or both of the elections were stolen, as well. I remember Dean Chambers and UnskewedPolls.com, for example, and the general Republican denial of reality surrounding polls in the 2012 election. If you think Chambers was right, then it’s natural to believe that the actual election results were evidence of fraud and, therefore, that the Democrats stole the White House.
It becomes even easier to believe if you think your right little, white little echo chamber is representative of the country as a whole, and that since you personally don’t know anyone to the left of Ted Cruz that the country as a whole is a great big Silent Majority of Republicans, and that any evidence to the contrary is Liberal Deceit of the kind literally every media outlet you actually pay attention to rants about.
It’s a stupid, sordid, tail-eating little worldview which is rather cynically run as a profit-making enterprise by the right-wing media outlets, and which has now produced a Republican base which gives nontrivial support to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and which cannot even countenance anyone as pragmatic as Jeb Bush, let alone Kasich, and which would burn Nixon alive for being a Socialist, which is ironic because Nixon set the whole thing in motion.
No… Scalia changed his reasoning, in order to get the (conservative) results he wanted. If the “intent of the legislature” favored his views, it was an important element of the constitutionality of a law; if it went against his views, it was irrelevant to the constitutionality. He regularly engaged in that kind of double-think.