Shadow1980 said:
By "next President" I'm assuming you, McConnell, and a bunch of others are hoping that our next President is a Republican. The longest it took to confirm a nominee in U.S. history was about four months, and that was during the Wilson administration. What you and the GOP are proposing is holding the nomination process hostage for at least whole eleven months until things are more favorable to the GOP (something that they couldn't realistically do during the Kagan and Sotomayor nominations). But that's a big gamble. What if our next President is Clinton or Sanders? Do we wait until 2021 to fill the vacancy should the next President be a Democrat but only a one-term President? But if the Dems regain control of the Senate and retain control of the White House, this will have just been a colossal waste of time. Let's be honest. This isn't about "the voice of the people," because the people chose back in November 2012 who gets to nominate SCotUS justices should any vacancies arise from 2013 to 2016. They chose Obama. This isn't about "doing what's right," either. No, this is about playing politics, plain and simple. The prospect of the deeply conservative Scalia's seat being taken over by an Obama nominee is unacceptable to the GOP, a party whose own Senate leader, the very same Mitch McConnell who's proposing we wait until January to replace Scalia, admitted back in 2010 that, and I quote, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president" (how'd that work out for you, Mitch?). Over the past seven years we've had the least productive, most obstructionist Congress in history because of the very mindset that produced that "one-term president" quote. Now, imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Let's assume McCain won in 2008 and was re-elected in 2012 and Scalia still died when he did, but the Democrats controlled the Senate and Harry Reid was saying we should wait for the people to pick the next President, refusing to hear any nominations for the next eleven months. If the Democrats were threatening to block a Republican President's nominee in the last year of his term, the GOP would be having a field day over it right now. Oh, and let's not forget that McConnell said back in 2005 that "Any President’s judicial nominees should receive careful consideration. But after that debate, they deserve a simple up-or-down vote. It’s time to move away from advise and obstruct and get back to advise and consent. The stakes are high. ... The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation. In effect, they would take away the power to nominate from the President and grant it to a minority of 41 Senators." But back in 2005 Bush was President, which kind of proves my point. |
Plus, make no mistake, this would put the Supreme Court at an even split (4-4) for not only the rest of this session, but the entire next session. Scalia's votes as of his death on any case before the Supreme Court that hasn't yet been revealed to the public, is now null and void. So, as it stands, we're talking a 4-4 split, which doesn't nullify anything, it merely refers the case back to the lower court ruling.
This country has many issues, that are constantly in need of SCOTUS review, to have an evenly split SCOTUS for such a length of time would be quite bad.
