At least someone is willing to do their job in the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death, and that someone is President Obama:
The White House on Monday said President Barack Obama had started preliminary discussions with his team about naming a Supreme Court justice nominee and accused Republicans of "bluster" for saying they would not confirm his pick.
Bluster it may be, but it’s coming from a lot of Senate Republicans—from presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, from Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and even from a growing list of vulnerable Republican incumbents up for re-election this November. Ohio’s Rob Portman and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey have joined that chorus:
Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, who faces re-election this year, said in a statement that the Senate should follow what he called “common practice” to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, agreed, leaving nearly every vulnerable Republican incumbent backing Mr. McConnell’s pledge.
Why would a swing-state Republican senator facing a challenge in a presidential election year say ahead of time that he would block any nominee the president could possibly make, leaving a Supreme Court vacancy for at least a year? Maybe because of this:
“Senator McConnell is right: Under no circumstance should the Republican Senate majority confirm a Supreme Court nominee as Americans are in the midst of picking the next president,” said Michael A. Needham, the president of Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation.
These Republicans are terrified of opposition from their right—they’ll think about the general election, and what those voters might think of the decision to leave the court deadlocked on the most important cases, later. Maybe they’re hoping they can get the media to cooperate in convincing voters that this is standard practice, rather than a violation of all historical precedent.