Biden: Obama Supreme Court Pick Must be ‘Consensus’ Choice

Sandra Day O’Connor, the retired Supreme Court justice appointed by a Republican president, said on Wednesday that President Barack Obama should get to name the replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The Mass on Saturday morning at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception caps two days of official mourning for Scalia, who spent almost three decades on the high court and was one of the country’s most influential conservatives.

The president has been criticised for saying he will not attend the justice’s funeral in the city on Saturday.

Scalia’s eight Supreme Court colleagues, his family and almost 100 former law clerks watched solemnly as Supreme Court police placed the casket on a funeral bier first used after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

“You just have to pick the best person you can under the circumstances as the appointing authority must do, and one that we care about as a nation and as a people”, she added.

The Supreme Court generally doesn’t like voting changes to take effect close to an election, though some of the liberal justices have objected when the court blocked changes that would have benefited minority voters.

Vice President Joe Biden has “no desire” to be a Supreme Court Justice, the vice president said in an MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow, according to a transcript of the interview.

Scalia’s casket was to remain at the Supreme Court until early Saturday.

“The president’s team, over the course of this week, has spent a lot of time preparing materials for the president’s review, and I would expect, over the weekend, that the president will begin to dig into the materials that have been prepared for him”, Earnest said. As you know, gave 33 years of his life to the court.

But Obama seems to be moving right ahead with the process even as he tries to assuage the concerns of his detractors in the Republican Party. Obama has insisted that he will nominee a successor.

His death set the stage for a political showdown between the Democratic president and Republicans in the U.S. Senate who are threatening to block any nominee put forward by Obama to fill Scalia’s vacancy. President Obama has already been given that voice in 2012 by a huge majority. GOP aides circulated a comment that current Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada made during a 2005 debate over judges nominated by Republican President George W. Bush.