Republicans and Democrats draw battle lines over supreme court nomination

Presidential candidates and congressional leaders wasted no time on Sunday in seeking to establish the contours of the coming battle over the replacement of the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, who died on Saturday at the age of 79.

The contest over Scalia’s replacement to some extent eclipsed tributes to the conservative justice, who served on the court for 29 years, and the fallout from an acrimonious Republican debate in South Carolina on Saturday night.

The Senate judiciary committee’s top Democrat, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, was first out, to call for a rapid hearing and vote on President Obama’s as yet unnamed nominee. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, however, had already ruled out the approval of a replacement until after the presidential election.

A White House spokesman said later on Sunday Obama would wait to nominate a candidate until the Senate is back in session.

Scalia’s replacement stands to tip the balance of the court, which with his death is left divided between liberal and conservative justices. Republicans, seeing the danger of a new and comparatively young liberal being appointed, are seeking to stymie Obama and, in the words of candidate and Texas senator Ted Cruz, make the presidential election a “referendum on the court”.

On the Democratic side, the policy is to appeal to voters on the grounds of Obama’s constitutional rights and to warn of elective disaster if the party’s wishes are ignored.

Leahy said that if the Republican leadership refused to hold a hearing, the GOP would be punished by voters in November.

“If the Republican leadership refuses to even hold a hearing, I think that is going to guarantee they lose control of the Senate,” he said.

Leahy’s forecast was in keeping with the developing Democratic party line: to appeal to US voters’ sense of political decency and force Republicans to grant Obama what they consider his constitutional right – to nominate and confirm a new justice before the end of his time in office.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said on Sunday it was “beyond comprehension” that Republicans were threatening to deny Obama this right.

“The issue must be taken to the people,” he said, on CBS’s Face the Nation. “Fair-minded Americans, no matter what their political point of view, will say this is absurd, this is obstructionism and not what democracy, or Congress, is supposed to be about.”

Sanders – who followed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in condemning what they saw as Republican obstructionism – vowed to do everything he could to make the legislative body go through with speeding confirmation hearings.

Asked what leverage Democrats would have if the Republican majority in Congress decided to “slow-walk” the process, he said such tactics would serve only to illustrate “the level of Republican obstructionism against Obama from day one”.

“This is not something in debate,” he said. “The constitution provides for a president to nominate a supreme court justice and the Senate hold hearings to approve that nomination. The idea that Republicans want to deny the president his basic constitutional right is beyond my comprehension.”

Republican presidential candidates, meanwhile, warned that the addition of a liberal-leaning justice could lead to the undoing of recent conservative rulings, including limitations on voting rights and campaign finance reform.

Cruz maintained the Senate should not even attempt to go through the process of confirming a new justice during the term of this administration.

“The Senate’s duty is to advise and consent,” Cruz said on ABC’s This Week, “and we’re advising the president now.”

In the same vein, Senator Marco Rubio warned that legislators would not move forward to confirm any nominee President Obama puts forward. He dismissed the precedent of Ronald Reagan, who nominated and won the confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy during his final months in office.

“The president can nominate any candidate he likes, and we can debate, but the Senate will not move forward on it. Period,” Rubio said, on NBC’s Meet the Press.

He argued that the nomination of a new justice, of left or right, should be part of voters’ deliberations on November. The president, he said, “should allow the next president to appoint a justice”.

With opposing positions essentially laid out, the political landscape gives Obama one further option: to make a (highly controversial, and unlikely) interim appointment while the Senate is in recess.

Leahy said the process had not yet arrived at that point, though he did not take it out of the equation.

“I think what we ought to do is nominate somebody,” he said.

Eric Schultz, the White House spokesman, later counted the option out as an immediate ploy. He said: “Given that the Senate is currently in recess, we don’t expect the president to rush this through this week.

“We expect the Senate to consider that nominee, consistent with their responsibilities laid out in the United States Constitution.”

Obama is traveling in California and returns to Washington on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Scalia’s body lay in a Texas funeral home on Sunday as officials awaited word about whether they would need to perform an autopsy before the late supreme court justice could return home to Virginia. In the nation’s capital, flags flew at half-staff at the White House and supreme court.

• This article was amended on 15 February 2016 to reflect that Ronald Reagan nominated and won the confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy, not Justice Ann Kennedy.