With the passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia comes a bit of a minefield for the various interested parties.
- Republicans – Within hours of Scalia’s passing came full-throated calls for a refusal to confirm any Obama nominee, not least from Donald Trump, as reported by the Washington Examiner:
“This is a tremendous blow to conservatism. It’s a tremendous blow, frankly, to our country,” Trump added before laying out a strategy for the situation. “It’s called delay, delay, delay.”
Similar pronouncements came from Rubio, Cruz, and Bush. This, of course, is part and parcel with the general GOP strategy ever since President Obama took office – just say NO. But is it wise?
The independents hold the power of choosing the next President, and the passing of Scalia guarantees yet another legitimates reason for the GOP’s methods to be put on display. This is where the electorate has the opportunity to gather more information when it comes to the nature and desirability of the GOP as holding the Presidency – or even the Senate.
It would have been much more interesting if one of the major candidates had come out calling for a moderate response, suggesting that a centrist nominee might be acceptable. That might have left the Democrats in a small quandary – although, frankly, President Obama’s history suggests the GOP has small realistic hope of tying his hands in any intellectual contest.
If the GOP continues this course, Obama may in fact choose to nominate a centrist – and leave the GOP with the unfortunate choice of rejecting a truly acceptable nominee, or breaking their word and stunning their base. The former choice leaves them with the substantive appearance of lacking seriousness about the governance of the most powerful nation on earth – because the SCOTUS should be fully populated in order to properly decide cases. Now, if their demographic base was expanding, or showing signs of possibly expanding, they could pursue this course – but it’s not, as discussed here last year. Their base is slowly dying off, or becoming disaffected and leaving.
And if – as seems likely – we have a President Clinton or Sanders next year, what will the GOP do then? Especially if they still control the Senate? Say NO for 4 more years? The situation begs a response from the inimitable Mark Twain, sadly gone all these years.
- Democrats – The Democrats have their own set of problems. Nominating a very liberal judge could spoil the GOP’s dance of death, as the independents might find this to be out of line; nominating a centrist could discourage their own base to the point where they refuse to come out to vote – which they cannot afford.Then comes the question of adroit management of the process. If the GOP stands firm, how do the Democrats handle the inevitable charges of failure in a Senate in which they have little to no leverage over a group of GOP Senators who refuse to heed the calls of responsible governance?
- Judicial Branch – They are the victims. They face a SCOTUS minus a Justice for an indeterminate amount of time, hostage to the animus of the two other branches of government. When 4-4 ties occur, the general rule (according to Slate) is that the lower court ruling is affirmed, but no precedent is set, so there will not be a bulge in the backlog of cases – but the machine will be damaged, nonetheless.But this may also be the wildcard in the bunch. The Chief Justice is the generally conservative John Roberts, a relatively young man who may be more interested in restoring SCOTUS to its full complement than winning an ideological war from which he is, at this juncture, somewhat isolated. SC Justices have a history of blazing their own path, and it’s possible that if the GOP tries to follow through on its promise of saying NO, he may begin a public critique of their positions with an underlying threat of taking more liberal positions than they like if they do not cooperate.
All of this may be wrong, of course, as the propaganda machines of both sides wind into action. It’ll be interesting to see how this all spins out.
