It didn’t take long for the GOP to step over Scalia corpse and start shouting. The same happened almost immediately on Twitter yesterday with an insane POTUS murder plot. The leading conspiracy theory about Antonin Scalia’s death? Obama did it. The Supreme Court justice died in his sleep on Saturday at a luxury resort in West Texas, putting the Court’s conservative majority at risk. Whether President Obama’s eventual nominee somehow gets confirmed this year is no sure thing. The GOP has vowed to block any nominees. But in the election year, it gets complicated. The Washington Post says,
Most of the country, though, is governed by appeals courts dominated by Democrats. The suit against Obama’s environmental initiative, which the Supreme Court just stayed, came from the liberal D.C. Circuit, which had unanimously refused to grant the stay. Now the Obama administration can simply have the Environmental Protection Agency come up with a slightly different new plan and run to the liberal D.C. courts to bless it and refuse to stay it. It’s unlikely the now-divided Supreme Court would come up with a majority to stay the new rules: The vote to stay the old ones was (naturally) 5 to 4.
That’s why the effect of an equally divided court has enormous potential to strengthen Obama’s hand in dealing with the Republican Senate in picking a replacement: Even if the GOP blocks his nominee, the policy outcomes would be very similar to what they’d be if the court had a liberal majority.
Sorry, TV political dramas, nothing you can invent will be as good as what reality has cooked up for us this election year. Check out the residents of Crazytown, below.
(via New Republic)
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