I have already addressed the Constitutional requirements of the President and Senate in regard to filling the now vacant seat on the Supreme Court in my previous post: The President is clearly obliged to nominate a replacement for Scalia, but the Senate is not obliged to confirm it.
There really are people out there who are silly enough to argue that the Senate is required to consent to whoever the president nominates. But that is clearly meaningless. If someone is required to consent, then it is not consent. Consent necessarily involves willful agreement. That's what the word, from the French, literally means: to feel together. If consent were required, then it would not be necessary at all. If that's what the Constitution meant, then it would just have said that the President gets to appoint. Period. End of story.
Isn't it ironic that the people who want the Senate to roll over and play dead when Obama tries to replace Scalia use the very technique of textual interpretation that Scalia despised when applied to the Constitution (or anywhere else)?
To a textualist, the meaning of the language governing the replacement of Supreme Court justices is fairly clear. But liberals think they have the right to make words mean whatever they want them to mean. "Marriage." "Family." "Child" (the literal meaning of the Latin fetus)—and to enforce their made-up meanings on everyone else.
I can just imagine what Scalia would have said about this, and it isn't pretty.
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