Antonin Scalia's death

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by wdmso

The poor guys hasn't even been buried and it begins.. However It is the sitting POTUS job to fill that Seat .. Just bad timing for the republicans
if they go crazy and try to block it until after the election it might blow up in their face


Note that the record for longest time period to go through this process is 125 days. Obama has 342 remaining in office.


Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Saturday that the Senate should wait until a new president is elected (WHY) besides the obvious


“The Supreme Court of the United States is too important to our democracy for it to be understaffed for partisan reasons, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

It's the job of POTUS, maybe his most important job, to occupy that court. Obama has every right to nominate someone.

"Just bad timing for the republicans "

No one gets in without approval of the Senate, which the GOP controls, so the timing could be a LOT worse. I don't know that I believe McConnell would have the onions to block an Obama nominee, but I believe that Cruz would.

How about this...in 2014, the citizens of this country gave the Senate to the GOP. Obama, when it suits him, likes to say, "elections have consequences". I have no quarrel (not that this surprises anyone) with the Republican senators declaring that based on the 2014 midterms, that the public doesn't want the makeup of the court tilted dramatically to the left. The 2014 midterm results make that pretty obvious.

We all know what happened to the Bush appointee Robert Bork. The Senate (when ruled by Democrats) refused to aprove of him, and that effort was lead by Biden. Let's see how Biden likes being on the other end of political gridlock. What's good for the goose...

Obama will probably nominate a transgender Native American female with Bolshevik political leanings, preferably one in a wheelchair, crippled from getting run over by a Koch Brothers oil truck. That way, when the Senate says "pass", Obama can say "see, the Republicans hate all these victim groups represented by this pick, blah, blah, blah."

That aside, I mourn the passing of Scalia, he was a worthy guardian or libetry. He also used to vacation all the time with Ginsburg. Talk about an unlikely pair!!

You think Leahy's statement isn't politically self-serving?

It will be very, very interesting. In the middle of the election, of all things.

[RIROCKHOUND]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

Obama will probably nominate a transgender Native American female with Bolshevik political leanings, preferably one in a wheelchair, crippled from getting run over by a Koch Brothers oil truck. That way, when the Senate says "pass", Obama can say "see, the Republicans hate all these victim groups represented by this pick, blah, blah, blah."
.

Saw this elsewhere, the speculation has begun...

"My mole in the White House tells me Obama will nominate 46-year-old Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American jurist who Obama nominated in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- and the Senate confirmed unanimously. Having confirmed him unanimously just three years ago, it would be difficult (but hardly impossible) for Republicans to oppose him now. (Twelve former Solicitors General, including Republican notables as Paul Clement and Kenneth Starr had endorsed his confirmation. Moreover, the D.C. Circuit has long been a Supreme Court farm team – Scalia himself, along with John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were judges there before ascending to the Supreme Court.)

But is Srinivasan progressive? He had been Obama’s principal Deputy Solicitor General before the nomination, arguing Supreme Court cases in support of affirmative action and against Indiana’s restrictive voter ID law, for example. But this record doesn’t prove much. (Having once worked as an assistant Solicitor General, I know the inhabitants of that office will argue whatever halfway respectable arguments the Justice Department and, indirectly, the President, wants made.)

Before the Obama administration, Srinivasan worked for five years in George W. Bush’s Justice Department. Prior to that, as an attorney in the private firm of O'Melveny & Myers, he defended Exxon Mobil in a lawsuit brought by Indonesians who accused the company’s security forces of torture, murder, and other violations against their people; successfully represented a newspaper that fired its employees for unionizing; and defended Enron’s former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, later convicted for financial fraud. But in these instances, too, it could be argued he was just representing clients. Another clue: After graduating Stanford Law School in 1995, Srinivasan clerked for two Republican-appointed jurists – Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor – both of whom were considered moderate. "

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by RIROCKHOUND

Saw this elsewhere, the speculation has begun...

"My mole in the White House tells me Obama will nominate 46-year-old Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American jurist who Obama nominated in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- and the Senate confirmed unanimously. Having confirmed him unanimously just three years ago, it would be difficult (but hardly impossible) for Republicans to oppose him now. (Twelve former Solicitors General, including Republican notables as Paul Clement and Kenneth Starr had endorsed his confirmation. Moreover, the D.C. Circuit has long been a Supreme Court farm team – Scalia himself, along with John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were judges there before ascending to the Supreme Court.)

But is Srinivasan progressive? He had been Obama’s principal Deputy Solicitor General before the nomination, arguing Supreme Court cases in support of affirmative action and against Indiana’s restrictive voter ID law, for example. But this record doesn’t prove much. (Having once worked as an assistant Solicitor General, I know the inhabitants of that office will argue whatever halfway respectable arguments the Justice Department and, indirectly, the President, wants made.)

Before the Obama administration, Srinivasan worked for five years in George W. Bush’s Justice Department. Prior to that, as an attorney in the private firm of O'Melveny & Myers, he defended Exxon Mobil in a lawsuit brought by Indonesians who accused the company’s security forces of torture, murder, and other violations against their people; successfully represented a newspaper that fired its employees for unionizing; and defended Enron’s former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, later convicted for financial fraud. But in these instances, too, it could be argued he was just representing clients. Another clue: After graduating Stanford Law School in 1995, Srinivasan clerked for two Republican-appointed jurists – Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor – both of whom were considered moderate. "

I was half-joking, but it wouldn't shock me at all.

I don' think Obama gets any appointee confirmed, who isn't as conservative as Scalia. And I would urge every Republican Senator to do whatever they had to do, to prevent Obama from dragging the court one zillimeter to the left of where it is now.

God, I hate that this happened.

"If the Constitution means whatever the present society wants it to mean, then sometimes it will evolve in the direction of greater freedom, and sometimes it will evolve in the direction of less freedom, as it has often done throughout our history." -Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died today at the age of 79.
In the words of Shakespeare, "He should have died hereafter."

This was Scalia's defense of his view that it's not healthy for each generation to decide what the Constitution really means, in light of the view of the times. If we were to do that, then the rights spelled out in the Constitution are not guaranteed, but rather subject to the whim of whoever is in office at the time. I don't want Obama getting to decide what the Bill Of Rights really says, nor do I want Trump doing it. The only way to guarantee those rights, is to implement the Constitution the way it's written. If we want to change it, there is a mechanism to do that.

How does anyone disagree with what Scalia said here?