(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)President Obama began interviewing potential Supreme Court candidates this week for the vacant seat created by the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month. The president has proceeded with the nomination process despite Republican senators’ vows to refuse to vote on any Obama nominee, and instead wait for the next president to select the court’s new justice.
Within hours of the death of Justice Scalia, who led the Roberts court’s conservative wing for more than three decades, Senate Republicans pledged to refuse to hold a hearing on any nominee President Obama offers for the vacancy — despite their clear constitutional duty to do so, and despite the fact that the president has yet to select a candidate for the job.
Scalia’s vacancy gives President Obama a rare opportunity to shift the political balance of the court, and the president is currently considering a handful of relatively new federal judges with very limited judicial records — from which any discernible guiding ideological preferences are difficult to extrapolate — as part of a strategy to overcome entrenched Republican recalcitrance in the Senate, according to The Washington Post. Even a moderate candidate could significantly shift the balance of the court toward a more liberal orientation.
“The Senate’s consideration of the next Supreme Court nominee should not be a question of politics or electoral math.”
But as the president continues to interview potential candidates in order to fill the vacancy, many advocates and activists are scrutinizing the list’s limited jurisprudence for any clues into the judges’ positions on issues ranging from reproductive justice to voting rights to their views on increased gun control measures.
But how does the president’s list of potential nominees stack up in regard to campaign finance reform and the possibility of overturning the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010? It’s a key test that both…