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The Republican majority in the US Senate wants to vote on the successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday, on the Supreme Court ahead of the November 3 presidential election. This was announced by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just hours after his death was announced. Given the fundamental importance of the Supreme Court justice’s position in setting the fundamental course of American society, this position is likely to provoke heated political controversy.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, had already announced in August that he would try to fill a position on the Supreme Court that could remain vacant even in the last months of his current term. In an initial reaction after a campaign appearance in Minnesota on Friday, he said nothing. He simply praised Ginsburg as an “incredible woman who has lived an incredible life” and as the “titan of the law.” With her judgments on, among other things, equal rights for women and people with disabilities, she “inspired all Americans and generations of great legal thinkers,” Trump said Saturday night on Twitter.
“The candidate proposed by President Trump will get a vote in the United States Senate,” McConnell had already announced. In 2016, Republicans under his leadership blocked a Supreme Court candidate nominated by then-Democratic President Barack Obama in the Senate, also with reference to the upcoming presidential elections.
In light of the procedure at the time, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now asked Republicans to decide on the replacement of the next president. It exactly repeated McConnell’s words from 2016.
“The Highest American Ideals”
US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also called for a Ginsburg successor not to be named in President Trump’s current term. “Certainly, the voters must choose the president, and the president must propose the judge to the Senate,” Biden said Friday of the order of decisions to be made. That is the position that the Senate must take.
Biden said Ginsburg embodied “as a judge the highest American ideals.” It also recognized his important commitment to the equality of women in the United States. “She was a voice for freedom” and fought tirelessly for civil rights, Biden said.
The Supreme Court of the United States has a formative role in society and politics in the United States, negotiating highly controversial issues such as abortion, the gun law, equality, and immigration. A Trump-nominated judge could consolidate the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and thus shape social and political life in the United States for years. The judges are appointed by the Senate on the proposal of the president, Republicans have a majority in the chamber with 53 out of 100 seats.
According to one report, Ginsburg herself wanted her vacant position as a judge on the highest court in the United States to be filled in the next presidential term. “My fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until there is a new president in office,” Ginsburg said a few days before her death, US broadcaster NPR reported, citing her granddaughter Clara Spera. Ginsburg died Friday at the age of 87 from complications from cancer.
