Earnest: President Obama Must Make Compelling Case for New Supreme Court Justice

Vice President Joe Biden will attend the funeral.

“And I had it on my calendar and I got busy writing an opinion and I thought, you know what?”

There are some people who perceive the President’s lack of attendance as a snub to the legacy of Justice Scalia who is viewed widely as a man of great character as well as an intellectual and conservative giant. The Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group headed by a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said it was spending more than $1 million on TV and radio ads in Washington arguing that “next president chooses the next justice”. In Twitter post No. 4 she announced that she’s urging Obama to follow what she called “a tradition embraced by both parties” and let the next president make the nomination. While he still says President Obama should defer and he declined to commit to holding hearings, Grassley did say he would take the proceedings “one step at a time”. And Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said it seemed clear that Obama would not get a nominee confirmed unless he were to pick someone in Scalia’s mold, preserving the court’s ideological balance. Can we really expect him to nominate a judge who will respect not just the institution of the Supreme Court, but the Constitution? In it King said “the President’s term is four years, not three years and one month”, and that to “delay the consideration of a nomination for nearly a full year would be nothing more than the cynical politics that people in ME and across the country are exhausted of”.

“We were encouraged all the way through the process in hopefully Justice Scalia’s passing does not impact the ultimate decision adversely but there is a possibility that could occur”, said Pruitt. Those included the contentious 1991 hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I don’t agree”, O’Connor, 85, told an Arizona television station.

Senators Dean Heller of Nevada and Thom Tillis of North Carolina this week also indicated support for allowing the Senate to consider Obama’s nominee.

Earnest rebuked critics who he said “want to use the funeral of the Supreme Court justice as some sort of political cudgel”.

Today, Scalia’s casket is in the Supreme Court, where it rests on the same wooden catafalque used for Lincoln and other presidents and justices.