Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that Republicans’ calls to leave Supreme Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat vacant until after 2016 are “absolutely, thoroughly irresponsible.”
Biden also compared the Senate Republicans’ efforts to create gridlock in the judicial branch to choosing to leave the presidency vacant should anything happen to the President.
“To leave the seat vacant at this critical moment in American history is a little bit like saying, ‘God forbid something happen to the President and the vice president, we’re not going to fill the presidency for another year and a half,'” Biden said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.
Within hours of Scalia’s death, Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, declared they would not consider any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama, saying the next president should pick Scalia’s successor.
Obama has said he would nominate a replacement “in due time.”
But Biden said Obama wouldn’t nominate “the most liberal jurist in the nation,” but would instead pick a successor that Republicans could support.
“The Senate gets to have a say, and so in order to get this done the president is not going to be able to go out – nor would it be his instinct anyway – to pick the most liberal jurist in the nation and put them on the court,” he said. “There are plenty of judges who are on high courts already who have have unanimous support of the Republicans.”
I don’t expect the GOTP to act responsibly, ever. I expect them to act like what they’ve become…petulant children.
IMHO Obama can nominate a moderate who is acceptable to both parties and see this person confirmed. We don’t need a progressive at this point. Replacing an ideologue like Scalia with even a reliable swing vote puts us way ahead of where we were.
If we don’t replace the President, that means Obama gets to stay right? I fail to see the problem there.
Which the GOP would gladly do if they don’t win the White House.
When Clinton took office,they immediately set off on a quest to overturn the will of the people expressed in two elections by trying to impeach and oust him on personal matters.
When Obama took office, they immediately set off on a quest to obstruct literally everything he attempted, no matter how minor, in order to make him a “1 term president”, and failing that, continued to reflexively obstruct everything he does…again, completely ignoring the will of the people.
So yeah, I feel pretty safe in saying that the GOP would be fine and dandy with not replacing the President if a Democrat wins again.
The Vice-President is correct.
I agree with him of course, but a more cogent argument would have been if the vice presidency became vacant and Congress refused to consider the new prospective vice president whom the president would nominate per the Twenty-fifth Amendment. That would be particularly egregious in a situation like the current one, in which the Speaker of the House (next in line after the vice president) is from the other party.
As I recall, Speaker Carl Albert was greatly concerned that he might become president during the period between Spiro Agnew’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s swearing-in and between Nixon’s resignation (when the vice presidency became vacant as a result of Ford’s ascension to the presidency) and Nelson Rockefeller’s swearing-in. Albert felt that a Democrat’s succeeding to the presidency would be counter to the results of the 1972 election.