Court’s dominant conservative

Politics: Obama vows to nominate replacement over GOP objections

Although Republicans immediately made clear Saturday they intend to deny Senate confirmation of any nominee President Obama names to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Obama has plenty of reasons to try.

Within an hour of the news of Scalia’s death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

issued a statement declaring “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president. ... The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”

Many of the GOP presidential hopefuls, notably Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, likewise said Obama should not name a replacement.

But the president will not wait to choose a nominee. Speaking from Rancho Mirage (Riverside County), where he is preparing for a summit with Southeast Asian nations this week, Obama said he will “fulfill my responsibility to name a successor,” saying his duty to do so is “bigger than any one person ... it’s about our democracy.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., earlier dismissed GOP demands for delay, saying it would be “unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” and that failing to fill it “would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

Obama will “have to”

nominate a replacement, said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Reid, calling the logic in McConnell’s statement “so inherently crazy it defies description.”

Intense pressure

Manley said Obama will come under intense pressure from his own party to nominate a replacement quickly. “The real question,” Manley said, “is whether in light of Republican opposition he nominates someone far more to the left than he would have under different circumstances.”

Any Obama nominee would dramatically alter the high court’s fragile 5-4 split on the most controversial decisions, where Scalia has been the intellectual leader of the dominant conservative wing.

Whether Obama nominates a replacement or not, the mere existence of the vacancy, and Scalia’s towering stature on the conservative right, only raises the stakes for both parties heading into the election, said Republican analyst Ford O’Connell.

“Scalia’s death is a microcosm of the 2016 election for both sides,” O’Connell said.

Obama has 11 months left in his term, and Republicans — who hold 54 seats in the Senate — can delay any confirmation until after the November election. Leaving the position vacant means the court would be evenly split between liberals and conservatives. Several enormously consequential cases are to be decided before the current term ends in June, including a

regulation on coal-fired power plants that is the centerpiece of Obama’s climate change agenda.

In such controversial cases, “There’s a greater risk of 4-4 deadlock, in which case the lower court decision stands,” said Stephen Woolpert, a professort of politics at St. Mary’s College in Moraga.

The federal appeals court in Washington declined to block the climate rule, meaning that GOP refusal to fill the Scalia vacancy could have the effect of clearing the way for an Obama climate plan that Republicans contend must be stopped.

Rallying the base

Obama also could choose a nominee in part to rally the Democratic base behind the party’s nominee, be it Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, said Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Freed of the need to calculate a path to confirmation through the Republican-majority Senate, Obama could use the opportunity to choose his and the Democratic Party’s ideal candidate, sharpening the distinctions between the parties heading into the election.

“Given the fact that there is zero chance that the Republicans would go along with a confirmation vote this year, I can imagine someone in the White House arguing that they ought to go for a highly qualified replacement for Scalia — the Scalia of the other side,” Galston said. “Someone of a really dominant intellect, good writing style, relatively young, and let chips fall where they may.”

Galston said the vacancy could help mobilize the Democratic base, which he said “traditionally has cared less about the judiciary than the Republican base.”

Bertrall Ross, assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, said the “ramifications are pretty monumental for this election.”

“I think it puts the Supreme Court front and center in terms of the contests for both the Democratic and Republican nominee,” said Ross. “This is the first time in 30 years in which the court will potentially shift in a liberal direction.”