By: Jesse Saunders
Photo Editor

Whether you loved Justice Antonin Scalia or couldn’t find a good word to say about him is not the issue at hand. Scalia did his job, he served this country until his final day and refusing to nominate a new justice is an insult to all the work he has done. The longest this country has ever had to wait for a nomination barley clocks in over 100 days and President Obama has over 300 days left in office, yet 79 Republican senators are refusing to even pretend to look into the possible nominees.

The argument for waiting for a new president is in itself a gamble. Is there a contingency plan if a Democrat is elected? Or even worse, if Donald Trump, the bane of the moderate Republican, is elected? The senators currently blocking the nomination are playing with fire and putting a halt on another branch of government.

The best course of action for both the President and the filibustering senators is to collectively nominate and approve a moderate. The current election is already one of the most volatile and extreme in years, and an issue at hand that can be solved by those currently in power shouldn’t be waited on.

The current polls are not showing what many want, and instead of working with the president to find someone they can all agree will serve this country well for years to come, the senators would much rather chance the next justice being chosen by a woman they vilify at any chance, an “evil socialist” or a man who can’t go more than one second without shouting something racist.

It certainly has been a while, but 14 Supreme Court justices have been nominated during an election year. The circumstances may have been slightly different for each one, but this isn’t something the country has faced before, and it’s not something the country will never see again. It is naive to assume that this is the only chance the next president will have to shape our country’s most powerful courts. With America becoming more divided every day, we need to keep our court strong to help handle the challenges that will come no matter the outcome of the election.

Jesse Saunders is the president of the Democrats of Hofstra University

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