Filling supreme court opening should wait for election results

Posted October 2020

By Isabelle Donahue

Staff Editor

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s recent passing, it is ridiculous that President Trump is allowed to nominate a new Justice to the Supreme Court.

In 2016, when President Barack Obama was still in office, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia passed away. When Scalia passed, it sparked an immediate debate on whether Obama should be able to fill the empty seat during an election year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the nomination should wait until the next president comes into office while top Democrat Harry Reid called for the seat to be filled. In the end, it was decided that Obama would not be able to fill the seat during an election year. Many Democrats blamed this on the fact that the Senate majority was Republican. As the majority, they could refuse to begin the confirmation process for any nominee that Obama considered. Obama, most likely, would have filled the seat with someone with a more liberal mindset. On the other hand, the Senate, which still has a Republican majority, is allowing Trump to fill the empty seat. With Trump’s nominee being of a more conservative mindset, the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority for years because those appointed to the Supreme Court serve for life.

The fact that Trump is able to nominate someone for the seat now when four years ago it wasn’t allowed is hypocritical. It seems like the Republicans in the Senate refused to hold a Democratic president’s nominee’s confirmation hearings but, now that a Republican president has the same option, they are changing their opinions. This is extremely hypocritical of the Republican Senators. McConnell refused to hear Obama’s nominee because of the fact that it was an election year and that Obama was at the end of his second term and didn’t have a chance of being elected again. Now that Trump is making the nomination, McConnell is rushing the process.

The reasoning given for the difference in McConnell’s actions in 2016 and now is that the government isn’t divided. This means that both the White House and the Senate are held by the Republican party. In 2016, the White House was held by the Democrats, and the Senate was held by the Republicans so the government was divided. McConnell recently released a statement justifying his actions by giving 15 examples of times that a seat was open during an election year and the president then nominated a new justice to fill the seat. Eight of those times the government wasn’t divided, seven of those times actually ended in the nominee being seated. In this statement, McConnell didn’t add that, regardles of weather the government was divided or not, in none of the examples had the seat become vacant 100 or less days before the election. The situation that followed Justice Roger Tany’s death in 1864 is the most similar to what’s happening today. Tany died in October, less than 30 days before the election, but then President Abraham Lincoln made the decision to wait until after the election to fill the seat. So, yes, there are many examples of a seat being filled during an election year but none within 100 days of the election. If Trump were to do it he would be the first president to ever do so. Which is the exact opposite of what McConnell is leading people to believe.

Ginsberg passed away on September 18, which is 46 days before the election. Scalia passed away in February, which was nine months before the election. The Senate worked very hard to not let Obama’s nominee have appointment hearings, even though he had more than half a year left in office..

It seems to me that the Senate’s actions under its Republican majority are unsavory and hypocritical, kowtowing to Trump where it worked to spite Obama.