Senate GOP leaders claim they want to wait until 2017 to replace Justice Antonin Scalia

Have they finally found their balls?

Via Washington Times:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Saturday that the Senate should wait until a new president is elected to confirm a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose sudden death Saturday shook Washington and threatened to reshape the 2016 presidential race.
Democrats said that with 11 months left in Mr. Obama’s tenure, the Senate has enough time — and indeed an obligation — to confirm a replacement.
Mr. McConnell, though, said voters must be given a say in the matter, and that means picking a president who will nominate the replacement.
“The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” the Kentucky Republican said in a statement.
And Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, who controls the committee schedule for handling nominees, likewise said he supports deferring until next year, saying Mr. Obama has already turned the courts into a political battleground, so voters should be asked to referee.
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Amusing: SCOTUS Justice Scalia rips Obama a new one during Illegal Recess Appointments oral arguments…

Loving it...

Via TPM:

Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday tore into President Barack Obama’s use of recess appointments to staff government agencies when the Senate is unofficially on recess.
During oral arguments, Scalia shot back at an argument by U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli that the Constitution’s recess appointments clause is ambiguous enough to validate Obama’s temporary appointments.
“It’s been assumed to be ambiguous by self-interested presidents,” Scalia said, to “oohs” and laughs in the court room.
Scalia argued emphatically that the text of the Constitution does not permit presidents to appoint individuals to government agencies during pro forma sessions — when the Senate technically gavels in and out to fulfill a constitutional requirement, but does not conduct any business. He suggested the power ought to be restricted to official recesses.
“Let’s assume I think the text is clearly against you,” the Reagan-appointed justice told Verrilli during a lengthy back-and-forth early in the arguments, saying a president would have to “ignore the Constitution” to justify recess appointments during pro forma sessions.
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Rep. Barney Frank: Justice Antonin Scalia “an unreconstructed bigot,”

Nobody cares what Barney Frank thinks. It's time for him to head to the dustbin of history...

Via HuffPo:

In one of his last interviews before leaving Congress, Rep. Barney Frank gave a preview of the kind of no-holds-barred pundit he will be as he moves on to write books and become a TV commentator. The retiring 16-term openly gay Massachusetts Democrat called for the legalization of prostitution, cheered Washington State and Colorado for legalizing marijuana, labeled Justice Antonin Scalia “an unreconstructed bigot,” criticized those who took Prop 8 to the Supreme Court, defended the free speech of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and heralded the arrival of Congress’s first “gaysian” — the election of Mark Takano, an openly gay Asian-American from California to the House. [...]

On Justice Scalia and his latest anti-gay outburst, Frank is actually happy to see Scalia being honest.

“I was glad that he made clear what’s been obvious, that he’s just a flat out bigot,” Frank said. “I’d previously said he was a homophobe. And Fox and the rightwing said, ‘Oh just because he’s not for same-sex marriage? And I said, ‘No, let me be very clear. That’s not it. This is a man who has said you should go to prison for having sex.’ It was an extraordinarily abusive sentiment and it was dead wrong. And, by the way, for a guy who is supposed to be so smart — quite stupid.

Liberal Heartache: Justice Antonin Scalia claims 1942 ruling Wickard v. Filburn was wrong in new book

Liberals and Obamacare supporters were hoping Scalia supported the Commerce Clause expanding Wickard v. Filburn ruling. No such luck...


Via TPM:

To observers of the ‘Obamacare’ oral arguments, it would come as no surprise that Justice Antonin Scalia is a likely vote to strike it down. But there has remained one major wrinkle in his prior jurisprudence that continues to give hope to a handful of the health care law’s proponents that he’ll vote to uphold it.

Now, within days of the historic ruling, Scalia is releasing a new book in which he finds fault with a Roosevelt-era Supreme Court decision that forms a critical part of the legal undergirding for the health care reform law. For Scalia, that’s a dramatic turnaround, because he has previously embraced the premise of that decision in an opinion he authored in 2005 that supporters of the Affordable Care Act have frequently cited.

In Scalia’s new book, a 500-page disquisition on statutory construction being published this week, he says the landmark 1942 ruling Wickard v. Filburn — which has served as the lynchpin of the federal government’s broad authority to regulate interstate economic activities under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause — was wrongly decided.