Sandra Day O’Connor Says Obama Should Name Scalia’s Replacement

Republicans can’t come right out and say the truth, since “we hate the president” isn’t a compelling talking point, so they tend to frame their concerns as high-minded.

Conservative media and other figures have taken President Obama to task for his plan not to attend the Saturday funeral, and said he would have done so for a liberal-leaning justice. The president and first lady Michelle Obama will pay their respects Friday afternoon at the Supreme Court where Scalia’s body lies in repose.

President Obama is expected to spend a “significant portion” of the weekend pouring through materials related to potential Supreme Court nominees, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Friday. 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.

But to defeat Obama’s push, media consultants say, the GOP’s politicians should keep repeating an identical, tiresome and vague response on the issue, which would eventually starve the media of new drama that allows Obama to keep political pressure on the GOP. Earnest said those calls were a sign that Obama takes seriously the Senate’s constitutional role of giving advice and consent to the president’s judicial nominees.

Putting forward a nominee who already has been approved by Republicans in the past would give the White House its best chance at confirmation, Axelrod said. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday in a slight shift from his previous stance.

But in the world of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, what really happened was that President Obama politicized the justice’s death, forcing McConnell and his fellow senators to “fire back”. The failure of the collective Progressive voter turnout is now evident in this process of selecting a new Supreme Court Justice.

Scalia, appointed to the court by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1986, died at a Texas hunting resort at age 79.

She noted that it’s unusual to for a Supreme Court opening to exist in an election year, saying that the proximity to the presidential race “creates too much talk around the thing that isn’t necessary”.