President Barack Obama will fire the next shots Tuesday in the escalating battle to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, which is already shaping up as one of the most intense political feuds in years.
Obama will hold a press conference at 4:35 p.m. ET at the Sunnylands retreat in California, where he is hosting a summit of Southeast Asian leaders. Foreign policy is sure to take a back seat to the intrigue over Obama’s pick to replace Scalia, who died during the weekend, triggering a momentous fight over the future of the Supreme Court.
It will be the first chance for the President to weigh into the furor over the vacant seat on the Court since he made a short statement Saturday mourning Scalia, and making clear he would exercise his Constitutional duty to name a replacement.
Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, and candidates in the presidential race, raised the stakes in the hours after Scalia’s death by warning that Obama’s nominee should not even expect a vote before the President leaves office next January.
They say that the nomination of a new associate justice is so fraught with political implications, given that it could tilt the ideological balance of the Court towards liberals, that a nomination should wait until after the general election in November.
But White House officials hit back hard, arguing that the Constitution requires the President to nominate a replacement justice, as they attempted to refute Republican claims that new Supreme Court justices are not traditionally confirmed in a President’s final year.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Monday that the Senate’s “duties are ironclad” when it comes to voting on presidential nominees and don’t include “exceptions” for election years.
Given that the Senate is on recess this week, Obama will likely take the chance on Tuesday to forge ahead in the emerging public relations battle over the nomination that is drawing the Court into the furious politics of an election year.
Democrats are arguing that the Senate has the right to vote up-or-down against any nominee it deems unqualified but should at least give Obama’s pick the traditional confirmation hearings and a vote.
They hope that voters will consider the GOP’s refusal to undertake that process as a sign of obstruction and overreach that could cause a backlash against Republicans in November, when Democrats hope to take back the Senate.
Tuesday’s news conference might offer some early indications of Obama’s strategy in finding a nominee, a process that started quietly within the White House within hours of Scalia’s passing.
On the one hand, and despite the GOP gambit, the President could decide to find the candidate he believes has the most stellar legal qualifications and thus increase political pressure on Republican Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell for a vote.
But given that his pick is unlikely to even have confirmation hearings, Obama could chose to nominate a “sacrificial lamb” who would delight the Democratic Party’s liberal base voters and motivate a high turnout in November’s election.
Some Court watchers have suggested a compromise candidate, possibly a moderate Republican, whom it would be difficult for GOP Senate leaders to snub — for example someone like Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Hatch told CNN on Tuesday that he didn’t think he would be nominated.
“That’s kind of a joke. I’ll be 82 in March. They’re not going to put an 82-year-old man on there,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “New Day.”
“Of course if they decided to do that, I’d have every Democrat praying for my demise. If they did do that, and it’s not going to happen, but if they did, I would spend the next 20 years making sure that I did the job.”