What could /should be done about the empty SCOTUS seat? (Details )

NO. We have a new president now and he gets to make the appointment. The system was designed for nine and it shall be nine.

The court wasn’t always nine. It started with six and went to seven, nine, ten, and back to nine in 1869 (Wikipedia

And as we see now, the court can continue with eight during a vacancy.

With eight there can be tied votes, which result in lower court rulings standing.

But with the current president and Senate, the Republicans will fill the vacancies. All the Democrats can do is make their objections loud and clear.

The Democrats can claim that there is a history of 7 justices on the court, and try to block any Trump nominees, but the GOP will invoke the nuclear option, and the Senate will become even more useless.
Elections have consequences. We have to hope any Trump appointee will rise to the office.

That fight is pretty much over. The only way he could be blocked is if several Republican members of congress decided he wasn’t a good choice (extremely unlikely) or his confirmation was delayed somehow all the way until midterm elections (2018)... it’s done.

The precedent that’s set by not even hearing Obama’s pick is going to be with us for a long time. That sucks.

That said, honestly I think the Trump choice could have gone a lot worse. Maybe it’s a low bar, but Gorsuch seems to be extremely thoughtful and maybe even selfless. After reading some of his papers it’s fairly obvious he loves the law and the process it’s made by. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his beliefs, but I think you could do a lot worse than someone who lives and breathes his job and believes it’s a duty to the law rather than to a political party.

I was expecting someone flamboyant and edgy for the sake of argument, and someone sworn to a party. Under the circumstances, I think there’s bigger fights out there.

The position should be filled. It should have been filled a year ago following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia but it was argued at the time it was inappropriate for a departing president to make such an appointment. Obama still had 11 months to serve at the time so the argument was ridiculous but there’s not much can be done about it now.

Should the Dems give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine?
Yes.

How can the court “function ” with a vacant seat?
Just fine.

I know that the empty seat was held by a conservative, so it doesn’t seem like another one would be SO different.
But the Supreme Court as it was in the past gave us &?$^# Citizen’s United, the “corporations buying elections is free speech by ‘people’” decision that’s partly responsible for our current level of hell.

As for balancing the choices and/or getting a reasonable candidate, I think, as with other appointments and representatives, Congress ought to raise the bar (and have the bar raised on them). It doesn’t or shouldn’t matter who picked which justice. If it does, it’s probably a bad choice. The SCOTUS is supposed to be the pinnacle of impartial fair wise knowledgeable interpretation of the US Constitution, and not a war between the two scumbag gangs of corporate-corrutped political parties and the pet issues they use to rally voters against each other. Therefore, it seems to me that Trump should be allowed to appoint candidates as long as they are not partisan or strongly biased in favor of his party’s own opinions on the major party-war talking points, mainly abortion rights and corporate personhood (or others I might be forgetting or ignorant about), and as long as they aren’t bad (as I doubt Trump has any qualifications himself to know a qualified judge except asking other people who do know, and he’s surrounded by scumbags so Congress really needs to seriously vet them – too bad our current Congress (or at least the Republicans) seem incompetent at detecting screwball awful candidates as shown in the cabinet and department head appointments).

If they want to put in a fanatic right wing judge then I say sure, behave like the republicans. I rarely say something like that. The republican bullshit argument a year ago that we should wait and see who wins the election and let the new president put in a new justice was dispicible. Now, they are saying that when Obama was newly in office the Republucans went along with his Supreme Court choice, and now that a Trump is new in office the democrats should go along with Trump’s choice.

I’m so sick of everyone on on both sides and how they twist things to suit what they want. If my husband talked out of both sides of his mouth like most politicians, and shit, so many people in general, I would either go insane, or be in divorce court.

I might calm down and decide it’s better to confirm someone. We’ll see. Definitely if the person seems like a very reasonable choice I would want it to get done.

It’s going to be interesting to see how many actual answers anyone can get from Gorsuch during his confirmation process.

Apparently he doesn’t feel he should answer any questions regarding position on essentially anything. That’s unfortunate. I wish there was more at stake for him, he’s basically confirmed no matter what, but it doesn’t seem like it should be that way.

Article from The New York Times by Senator Schumer -

When I met with Judge Gorsuch on Feb. 7, I sought to ascertain his potential to be an independent check on the president. The judge was clearly very smart, articulate and polite, with superb judicial demeanor. But over the course of an hour, he refused to answer even the most rudimentary questions.

I asked him whether an unambiguous Muslim ban would be constitutional. He refused to answer. I asked him if he agreed with conservative lawyers who say the president has abused executive power. He refused to answer. I asked him whether he thought the president’s comments on voter fraud would undermine our democracy. He refused to answer. I asked him about landmark cases like Citizens United and Bush v. Gore. He refused to answer. Since he claims to be an originalist, I asked him about his view of what the framers intended with the Emoluments Clause in our Constitution.

He refused to answer any of these questions. He told me he couldn’t give me his view of any case, past or present, or any constitutional principle, because it might bias him. This blanket excuse frustrates any examination of what kind of judge the nominee will be. As the conservative icon Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote, “Proof that a justice’s mind at the time he joined the court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias.”

Remember that the seat shouldn’t be filled by someone who will fulfill someone else’s political agenda. Whoever gets the seat will have to act according to the law.