Biden’s Hard Choices to Change the Supreme Court: QuickTake

Scrambles for Supreme Court vacancies, a rare occurrence, have become one of the ugliest spectacles of the highly partisan era. Liberal frustration in particular has grown since 2016, when the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, gave Democratic President Barack Obama the opportunity to move the courts to the left. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, refused to consider Obama’s Merrick Garland nomination, citing that a vacancy should not be filled in a presidential election year. So it’s Republican Donald Trump, not Obama, who fills the void, with Neil Gorsuch. Fast-forward to 2020. A seat opened just six weeks before Election Day with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the court’s leading liberal voices. In that case, Republicans rushed to endorse Justice Amy Coney Barrett, backing the court’s conservative majority.