Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 2-16-16 Edition

President Obama Will Not Rush Choice After Supreme Court Justice
Yes, President Obama Can Still Nominate A
Antonin Scalia Dies Suddenly
Supreme Court Justice
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly on Saturday. The President will nominate his replacement.
The Republican presidential candidates are wrong. Supreme Court nominees can and should be confirmed in election years.
The authors of the U. S. Con- stitution did not outline a two- party system. Nor did they imagine that a plan for reason- able checks and balances would become a tool to empower petty obstructionists.
What the framers estab- lished was a system of sepa- rated powers with three branches of government: exec- utive, legislative, and judicial. In the event of a vacancy on the nation’s highest court, the founding document explained that the president “shall nomi- nate, and by and with the Ad- vice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint...Judges of the Supreme Court.”
The Constitution does not say that presidents may nomi- nate justices. It says they shall do so.
The Constitution does not say that presidents are limited in this duty by the timing when a vacancy occurs. There is no footnote that says presidents shall only perform their duties in their first terms. Nor is there a footnote that says members of the Senate shall only provide appropriate advice and consent when a president is in his or her first term. And there is certainly no language that suggests that a president’s nominee to the Court must parallel the ideol- ogy of the justice he or she would replace.
Yet Republican senators re- sponded to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by proposing to shred not just the Constitution but precedents that date from the earliest years of the American experiment. Within hours of the announcement of the con- servative jurist’s death on Sat- urday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new pres- ident.”
“I plan to fulfill my constitu- tional responsibilities to nomi- nate a successor in due time.” —President Obama
That would leave a vital po- sition vacant for a year.
Hours after McConnell outlined his unreasonable de- mand, the Republicans who would be president used Satur- day night’s crude and chaotic Republican presidential debate to be more unreasonable. They proposed that Pres. Obama abandon his constitutionally defined role in the process. They urged the Republican- controlled Senate to “delay, delay, delay” until the end of the president’s second term. And they proposed ideological litmus tests dictated not by re- gard for the Constitution but by their own rabid partisanship. Dr. Ben Carson summed up the sentiment when he said “we should not allow a judge to be
appointed during [this presi- dent’s] time.”
Even the Republican who has attempted to sell himself as the rational alternative in an otherwise feverish field, Ohio Governor John Kasich, said, “I really wish the presi- dent would think about not nominating somebody” be- cause “the country is so divided right now.”
All the Republicans joined in this egregious assault on the basic premises of the Constitu- tion and on the system of func- tional governance that is supposed to extend from it.
It fell to Pres. Obama to show respect both for the mem- ory of Justice Scalia—who he recognized as “one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court” and as a jurist who “dedicated his life to the cornerstone of our democracy: the rule of law”—and for the dictates of the Constitution. “I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” said Pres. Obama. “There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that per- son a fair hearing and a timely vote.”
The President is not naive. He knows that his nominee must secure the approval of at least a handful of Republican senators in order to be ap- proved. But Pres. Obama has already nominated two justices who have been confirmed with bipartisan majorities. He has a history of striking the right bal- ance.
The president was right to embrace the responsibilities of his office.
A number of other justices were nominated and confirmed on the cusp of election years. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, was confirmed in the fall of 1991—well after can- didates had begun positioning for the 1992 race that would see Pres. George H.W. Bush (the man who nominated Thomas) swept from office. It’s worth noting that, despite the proximity to an election, and despite the fact that the Senate was controlled by the opposition party, Bush nomi- nated a new justice who was dramatically more conservative than the man he would suc- ceed, Justice Thurgood Marshall.
There is no uncertainty here, no open question. Pres. Obama is correct when he says that the responsibilities of the president and the Senate are “bigger than any one party.”
“They are about our democ- racy,” he said on Saturday. “They’re about the institution to which Justice Scalia dedi- cated his professional life, and making sure it continues to function as the beacon of justice that our founders envisioned.”
President Barack Obama will not rush through a Supreme Court choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia who died suddenly on Saturday, but will wait to nominate a can- didate until the U. S. Senate is back in session, the White House said on Sunday.
“Given that the Senate is currently in re- cess, we don’t expect the President to rush this through this week, but instead will do so in due time once the Senate returns from their recess,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.
“At that point, we expect the Senate to con- sider that nominee, consistent with their re- sponsibilities laid out in the United States Constitution,” he said.
President Obama is traveling in Califor- nia and returns to Washington on Tuesday. The Senate returns from recess on Feb. 22.
Making a recess appointment would have been extremely controversial.
The White House declined to give a more specific timeline for President Obama to announce his nominee.
In remarks honoring Justice Scalia on Saturday, the President made clear he would not succumb to pressure from Repub- licans to leave the selection of a new justice to his successor.
The President, who leaves office in Janu- ary 2017, said he would make his choice in due time.
White House News
PAGE 6 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2016