Sunday, February 14th, 2016
Stephan: The entire election just changed. The Republicans, Congressional leaders and Presidential candidates, all are clamoring that Obama should wait; the next president should nominate the new Associate Justice. It is typical Republican obstructionism and I think could be turned by the Democrats into a big lever to elect a Democrat.
The reality is that it is 11 months until the next President is inaugurated and if we waited until then to begin it would take many more months to nominate and hold senate hearings before a new justice was seated.
It could be 18 months before we had an effective Supreme Court and, until then, on all 4/4 decisions the ruling at the Appellate level would be sustained. That is not the way the country is supposed to operate. This article spells out some of the issues that flow from Scalia's death.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
What are the legal and political implications of Antonin Scalia’s sudden death? First, in regard to the legal status of all cases currently before the Supreme Court, all of Scalia’s votes on those cases no longer count.
Justices cast their initial votes on cases in a conference, and the task of writing the majority opinion is assigned to a particular justice. Drafts of this opinion then circulate among those justices who voted in the majority, for comments and potential revisions.
But until the decision is formally issued, any justice is free to change the vote he or she cast in the conference. (For example, there is strong evidence that the Affordable Care Act was saved when John Roberts changed his mind after the initial conference vote, thus transforming what was originally the majority opinion in the case into the dissent).
This fact has serious practical implications for several important cases the Court is currently considering.
For example, it now seems likely that a crucial labor law case that seemed […]
