If the GOP congress can wait a year under Obama, what compels them to confirm under Prez HRC? How long would/could they continue holding out at that point?
ETA: I mean, aren’t all GOP house (and maybe senate) candidates going to run on not confirming ANY potential lib justice?
They’re still going nuts over at FreeRepublic. About how it was obviously a hit ordered by “The Pantsuit.” About how 79-year old men don’t just die of “natural causes.” (Tell that one to my dad, who died of natural causes at 50, in the form of 3 heart attacks in 4 days with no history).
And my current favorite…about how there should be an autopsy done on Scalia, but have it done out of the country so there’s no pressure to declare it natural when it obviously wasn’t.
ETA: That WAS my favorite, until I saw this:
“Recess appointments can’t be made to the Supreme Court so it’s senate confirmation or nothing. Now if we had a senate with a pair they would say from day one, we will NOT confirm anybody to the left of Scalia, period. However I’m guessing McCain, Graham and crew are already drooling to prove how inclusive the party is by quickly confirming whatever far leftist women, minority, homosexual that Obama nominates.”
Its so funny to me how people on the far right (Tea Party) and far left (Bernheads) are convinced their respective parties are so accommodationist. Both sides are way off, IMO.
Interestingly, when Souter retired, Scalia happened to be sitting near David Axelrod at some event, and Scalia urged him to tell President Obama to nominate Elena Kagan.
Deval Patrick? Might look like pandering, but what the hell, he’s got the record.
It’s also good for progressives to simply have one less reactionary on the court in the meanwhile, even if the seat remains vacant. Really, there’s no downside for the Dems no matter how long this takes, unless you can seriously imagine a Republican (who?) winning the Presidency this November. And stalling a vote will only help the chances of a Dem-controlled Senate, too, by making their mindless obstructionism more apparent to those who might still not grasp it.
But I don’t get how votes Scalia already cast don’t count anymore. How far back in time does that go, and why? Is his Bush v. Gore vote, flouting the Constitution he swore and claimed to uphold, no longer valid?
Scalia’s votes in Supreme Court decisions do count. It’s only the conference votes–considered to be tentative until the decision is actually handed down–that don’t count.
suggests that Obama already has an advantage with a deadlocked court. The thinking is that lower appeals courts are more liberal than not. They return decisions that conservatives don’t like, so they take it to the Supremes for them to overturn. Thing is, overturn requires a majority vote, a four to four tie leaves the lower courts decision in place.
So, Obama can put up an agreeably “vanilla” center-left nominee, the Republicans can block said nominee for fear of losing their grip on the Court, for fear of losing all the important cases. But blocking an agreeable and acceptable nominee looks bad, and it also loses a lot of important cases, cases they were otherwise likely to have won!
I’m still hooked of Free Republic. They have readers suggesting that Cruz should bow out of the election, and shoot for the SC position. As one person put it, “Cruz could re-claim his status as a respected American if he can cobble together the language that would remove him from the running as Presidential hopeful and put him in line for SC nominee.”
Others are claiming that that’s where Cruz belongs in the first place. My favorite line has changed again. It’s now “Scalia was the best Supreme Court Justice, bar none. The baton is passed to Clarence Thomas.”
Yeah, I was thinking BG had overstated things a bit. The conference votes don’t have any official existence, after all.
But the 5-4 vote the other day that placed a stay on Obama’s climate change regs doesn’t magically disappear because one of the 5 is now deceased. (If only.) It was a formal ruling, it’s out there, it’s in effect until the courts have decided the challenge to the regs.
Yeah. At least it’s only a temporary block (bad as that will be on many fronts), though.
As was said up-thread: a non-functional (if 4 -4 decisions become common) Court is better for the nation in many respects, as the Court has been (in the Roberts era) agreeing to rule on the more-progressive decisions by lower courts–with a view toward overturning those decisions. The less of that, the better off we’ll be.