Americans Split on if Senate Should Vote on Supreme Court Pick

Scalia’s death left the court with four conservative and four liberal justices.

“The most important senator in all of this, of course, is Ted Cruz, the Republican conservative of Texas who’s in a battle with Donald Trump for the presidential nomination”, Zwillich says.

Mr. Obama has made a decision to skip the funeral; Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden will attend it instead. “That’s exactly what the president and first lady will be doing”, White House press secretary Josh Ernest said during Thursday’s briefing.

“To leave the seat vacant at this critical moment in American history is a little bit like saying, ‘God forbid something happen to the president and the vice president; we’re not going to fill the presidency for another year and a half, ‘” Biden said. Presidents must very carefully take into consideration a nominee’s experience, political ideology, party, personal loyalties, ethnicity and gender. Invoking the Constitution he has selective use for, President Obama told reporters it was his “duty” to submit a name to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. Obama pledged to nominate a candidate “indisputably” qualified, but Republican leaders have threatened to refuse to hold hearings or a vote on his pick to replace the conservative Scalia.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the bench, came out sharply against Republican leaders in the political fight that has erupted since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Obama called the GOP’s statements “an extension of what we’ve seen in the Senate generally, and not just on judicial nominees”. The Kentucky senator joined several Republicans up for re-election in declaring that Obama should let voters in November weigh in on the direction of the court through their vote for president. Obama pledged to pick a replacement “in due time” and challenged Republicans to hold a vote on his nominee.

Earlier, during a brief and somber morning ceremony inside the courthouse’s Great Hall, Roman Catholic priest Father Paul Scalia, one of Scalia’s nine children, delivered a prayer before the eight justices and members of the Scalia family quietly filed away. Either they disapprove of that nominee or that nominee is validated to the supreme court.