Justice Scalia’s Death And Implications For The 2016 Election, The Supreme Court And The Nation
The future composition of the Supreme Court is the most important civil rights cause of our time. It is more important than racial justice, marriage equality, voting rights, money in politics, abortion rights, gun rights, or managing climate change. It matters more because the ability to move forward in these other civil rights struggles depends first and foremost upon control of the Court. And control for the next generation is about to be up for grabs, likely in the next presidential election, a point many on the right but few on the left seem to have recognized.
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Especially if Senate Republicans block a liberal appointee to the Supreme Court, this has the potential to inject this issue into the Presidential campaign. And it will work both ways. You can bet that Ted Cruz will be running on a platform to replace Scalia with more and more Scalias. This could finally be the election that brings the Supreme Court into national focus much more (it has not been mentioned so far in any of the presidential debates I’ve seen). You can listen to UCI Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discuss the implications of the changing Supreme Court with Dahlia Lithwick on Slate’s Amicus podcast.
The Implications for the Nation of a changing Supreme Court. There is so much at stake concerning the Supreme Court for the next few years. As I wrote in Plutocrats United, the easiest way to amend the Constitution to deal with campaign finance disasters like the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United is not to formally amend the Constitution, but instead to change the composition of the Supreme Court. Regardless of what happens with Justice Scalia’s replacement, there will be likely at least three other Justices to be appointed over the next 4-8 years of the next President’s term. The stakes on all the issues people care about—from abortion to guns, from campaign finance and voting rights to affirmative action and the environment, depend upon 9 unelected Justices who serve for life.
Ed Whelan (a strong conservative, and former Scalia clerk) and I will be doing a webcast on The Supreme Court and the 2016 Elections on Feb. 22. I’m sure these issues will be hotly debated, as moderated by my colleague (and former LA Times legal correspondent Henry Weinstein).
The kind of battles we will see over the fate of our Nation, enacted in the polarized Congress and in a polarized nation, will be epic. The stakes are high, and as I explain in Plutocrats United, depending on conditions we could see a vacant Supreme Court for a while (look for conservatives to argue over that) and likely the end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees (look for that if there is unified control of the Presidency and Senate, but without a filibuster proof majority.)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/scalia-death-2016-implications
