President Barack Obama and his Republican
opponent Mitt Romney sparred over matters large and small in this
month’s three presidential debates, yet when it came to one of the
most pressing issues in American politics, the two candidates were
strangely quiet. There was not a single discussion about the
president’s central role in appointing new justices to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
That silence makes even less sense when you consider the demographic forces at work. Of the Court’s nine sitting members, four are now in their 70s, including 79-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recently underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer, a notoriously deadly affliction. America’s next president may well have the opportunity to name one or more new justices to the High Court. Shouldn’t the voters get to hear something about it?
Let’s say Obama is reelected and Justice Antonin Scalia, now 76, ends up retiring for health reasons at some point during Obama’s second term. As things currently stand, there are four votes on the Supreme Court to strike down the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which Scalia joined, and where the Court voided multiple restrictions on political speech by corporations and unions. In fact, just last term, Justice Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer publicly urged their colleagues to accept a campaign finance case from Montana where the state’s Supreme Court rejected Citizens United entirely. Agreeing to hear the Montana case, Ginsburg wrote in a statement joined by Breyer, “will give the Court the opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.” Instead, a majority of the justices voted to summarily reverse the Montana ruling. If an Obama nominee replaces Scalia, however, the next challenge to Citizens United will face a far more receptive audience.
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/24/how-the-presidential-election-will-impac
That silence makes even less sense when you consider the demographic forces at work. Of the Court’s nine sitting members, four are now in their 70s, including 79-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recently underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer, a notoriously deadly affliction. America’s next president may well have the opportunity to name one or more new justices to the High Court. Shouldn’t the voters get to hear something about it?
Let’s say Obama is reelected and Justice Antonin Scalia, now 76, ends up retiring for health reasons at some point during Obama’s second term. As things currently stand, there are four votes on the Supreme Court to strike down the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which Scalia joined, and where the Court voided multiple restrictions on political speech by corporations and unions. In fact, just last term, Justice Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer publicly urged their colleagues to accept a campaign finance case from Montana where the state’s Supreme Court rejected Citizens United entirely. Agreeing to hear the Montana case, Ginsburg wrote in a statement joined by Breyer, “will give the Court the opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.” Instead, a majority of the justices voted to summarily reverse the Montana ruling. If an Obama nominee replaces Scalia, however, the next challenge to Citizens United will face a far more receptive audience.
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/24/how-the-presidential-election-will-impac
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