US President Donald Trump wants to propose a successor to the Supreme Court ‘very soon’ for the late Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “It will likely be a woman,” Trump said on Saturday. Meanwhile, a first Republican senator has said the Senate would not be allowed to vote on the succession until after the presidential election on 3 November.
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“We will have a nominee very soon,” Trump said on Saturday before his trip to a campaign meeting in North Carolina. He would already put forward a name ‘next week’. “It will most likely be a woman,” added the Republican president. He named Amy Coney Barrett, a judge at a federal appeals court in Chicago, and Justice Barbara Lagoa of Atlanta as possible nominees.
The Democratic party had asked Trump to lift the nomination of a new Supreme Court judge over the presidential election. In those elections, Trump will take on Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Four years ago, Republicans in the Senate blocked the nomination of a candidate for Democratic President Barack Obama on the grounds that it was an election year.
Earlier on Saturday, a Republican senator also made it clear for the first time that there is a better wait. Trump has the constitutional authority to nominate a candidate, Susan Collins acknowledged. But “out of fairness to the American people … this decision on a term for life should be made by the president who will be elected on Nov. 3,” she said.
The Republicans have a majority of 53 Democratic elections against 47 in the Senate. Collins, who faces a difficult campaign in her state of Maine to keep her seat, is among the circle of moderate Republicans observers say could break out of party ranks if Trump quickly proposes a new candidate.
Progressive judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday at the age of 87 from pancreatic cancer. Trump wants to replace her with a conservative judge before the presidential election to please his religious right-wing constituency. It could tip the ideological balance in the influential Supreme Court in favor of the conservatives for some time. Before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, four of the nine judges still belonged to the progressive camp.
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