Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Friday that the Senate should refrain from filling the vacancy left by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg until a new president is elected. US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday at her home in Washington, DC, succumbing to complications surrounding metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Taking to his Twitter account on Friday, Schumer attributed his suggestion of waiting until America has a new president to the people of the nation having a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Schumer’s tweet coincided with the sentiment of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016.
Republicans, however, have said they would move ahead with a vacancy in an election year. There was a vacancy after Scalia passed away in 2016, but the next presidential team could be even more crucial for Supreme Court nominations, Fox News reported.
Ginsburg’s passing leaves a vacancy, and numerous other justices are over 70 including Justice Samuel Alito, who is 70, Clarence Thomas, 72, and Stephen Breyer, 82. Donald Trump last week announced a list of over twenty people he would fancy nominating to the Supreme Court.
The president read off these names from the White House last week. The list was graced by the Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, who recently spoke at the RNC (Republican National Convention), and Republican Senators including Missouri's Josh Hawley, Arkansas' Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz of Texas.
During the announcement, the president took a jab at his opponent Joe Biden for not releasing his own list of potential nominees, accusing them of failing to withstand scrutiny because they are far left. He called out the former veep to release a list of names, noting that it is important for him to do so but warned of the results to the high court if Democrats win the presidency.
He said the growing radical left movement ignores the concept of equal treatment under the law, adding that if this extreme movement garners a majority on the Supreme Court, it will end up transforming the nation without a single vote of Congress. Biden has still not released the names of his picks for the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. She spent over two decades on the bench and is survived by her two children James Steven and Jane Carol Ginsburg.