Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral mass was held on February 20, 2016.
About an hour after the confirmation of the death of Justice Scalia on February 13, 2016, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that the Senate should not confirm any of President Barack Obama’s nominees, suggesting, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Apparently McConnell didn’t realize that the American people have had a voice in selecting the next Supreme Court justice. By electing Obama President not once but twice, in 2008 and 2012, the people fully expected that if any Supreme Court justices died or retired, the President would fulfill his Constitutional obligation to nominate a new justice to the highest court in the land and the United States Senate would fulfill its obligation to hold nomination hearings on candidate(s) nominated by President Obama.
President Obama has nominated two justices to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan (August 2010) and Sonia Sotomayor (August 2009), and after he made those nominations, the Senate held hearings on them and ultimately confirmed them to the Court. Why, with nearly a year left in President’s current term, the Senate should not confirm any of the President’s nominees is absurd.
Although the Senate confirmed Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, a dozen Federal Circuit Court justice candidates nominated by President Obama are currently waiting for their confirmation hearings. Some of these nominations were made in January 2016, but others go back as far as July 2015.
Given that a dozen judicial candidates are waiting for the Senate to take up their nominations, it should come as no surprise that the Senate would not plan to hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominees made by President Obama. The Republican Senate is simply continuing its policy of not advancing any of President Obama’s appointments, trying as it has since his election in 2008 to block progress and avoid fulfilling its Constitutional obligation.
One does wonder how Sen. McConnell and others who agree with him (Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others) will behave if Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders are elected president in November 2016.
Wouldn’t that be ironic?