Senate obligated to consider Supreme Court nominee

Monday, Feb. 29, 2016 | 2 a.m.

It’s a pretty sure bet that when President Barack Obama in 2012 was returned by voters to another four years in the White House, he and the rest of the country assumed he’d serve the entire term into January 2017. And why not? It’s not only the constitutional expectation, but Obama had the support of the majority of the nation’s voters who certainly expected him to put in the full four years of his second term.

In fact, Obama is one of only six presidents who received a majority of the popular vote in two presidential elections. (A seventh president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, accomplished the feat in all four of his elections.)

Any suggestion that Obama should walk away prematurely from the job he was elected to perform — or any part of it, including meeting his constitutional obligation to appoint a Supreme Court justice — could be conjured only by his political enemies, the leadership and presidential candidates in the Republican Party.

This nonsense began about an hour after confirmation that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declaring that the next president, not Obama, should fill the vacancy. “The American people should have a voice” in the matter, McConnell said.

To that end, the Senate Judicial Committee’s Republican majority has pledged to ignore any nominations from Obama. “This nomination,” McConnell said, “will be determined by whoever wins the presidency in the polls.”

The obvious retort: The American people have a voice; they elected Obama and the members of the Senate who will confirm, or not, Obama’s choice. The Constitution has no asterisks, no exceptions and no footnotes about a sitting president yielding the task at hand to someone not yet elected.

This nakedly political move — McConnell hoping a Republican would be elected president and appoint a conservative to the bench — is embarrassing to witness, especially given such hypocrisy in McConnell’s position. This is the same man who wrote in the Kentucky Law Journal in 1970: “The president is presumably elected by the people to carry out a program, and altering the ideological directions of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a presidential platform.”

If McConnell now fears that Obama’s criteria in nominating a justice for the highest court may not echo his own, so be it; McConnell himself blessed that strategy 45 years ago. Instead, he is now leading his fellow obstructionists down a road of unprecedented legal consequences.

That a parade of Republican senators, including two who are running for president as well as our own Republican Sen. Dean Heller, are calling on Obama to shirk his duty speaks volumes about men who fancy themselves strict adherents to the Constitution. Apparently, that’s only the case when it’s convenient for them.

We had hoped that Heller would demonstrate the courage to do the right by the constitutional thing. Perhaps he will change his mind.

The very people who — for pandering purposes — brag about carrying the Constitution with them at all times should take the document out of their pockets and actually read it. No one says they have to vote for the nominee. But the Constitution does say a co-equal branch of government should have nine justices, and these folks have the solemn obligation to participate in the process that protects the one branch of government that is supposed to be above politics. We would have hoped Senate Republicans would not have tried to bully Obama into walking away from the duties of his constitutional role.

Republicans can’t have it both ways. They have sworn to uphold the Constitution. That means allowing the president to fulfill his responsibility and for them as senators to follow suit.