Within hours of the news breaking of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Saturday, Republican politicians and conservative activists circled the wagons and vowed to block the confirmation of any person President Obama nominates to replace him.
Some have tried to come up with bogus new “rules” about not confirming justices in a presidential election year. Some have tried to claim, as Sen. Marco Rubio did in Saturday’s Republican presidential debate, that more than 10 months before the next election Obama is already a “lame duck” president. Sen. Rand Paul went as far as to say that Obama has a “conflict of interest” in nominating judges who might consider the legality of things the executive branch does.
But some have been less coy about the purely political calculation behind the attempt to block an Obama nominee, including the Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino, who announced in a Newsmax interview yesterday that it would be “political malpractice” for Senate Republicans to allow President Obama to put another justice on the Supreme Court.
In a statement shortly after Scalia’s death was announced, Severino declared that Obama is “the last person” who should be nominating Scalia’s successor because he has “shown such contempt for the Constitution and the laws.”
Severino’s group was founded during the George W. Bush administration as the Judicial Confirmation Network, with the stated mission of ensuring “that the confirmation process for all judicial nominees is fair and that every nominee sent to the full Senate receives an up or down vote.” After President Obama was elected, the group conveniently changed its name and its mission.
