Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health scare raised the question of how the Senate would handle a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year.
WASHINGTON — When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was released from the hospital last weekend after another in a string of health scares, blue America breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more month, many whispered, until the start of a presidential election year when filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court would be off limits in the Senate.
But would it?
That was the case in 2016 when Senate Republicans stonewalledPresident Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to fill an opening that occurred with 11 months left in Mr. Obama’s tenure. “Let the people decide,” was the Republican mantra at the time, as they argued that it was improper to consider Mr. Obama’s nominee when voters were only months away from electing a new president who should get the opportunity to make his or her own choice on a Supreme Court justice.
View the complete November 29 article by Carl Hulse on The New York Times website here.
The legal cases concerning President Trump, his finances and his separation-of-powers disputes with Congress are moving like a brush fire to the Supreme Court, and together provide both potential and challenge for the Roberts court in its aspiration to be seen as nonpartisan.
The Supreme Court on Monday granted