Fox — Trump To Name Supreme Court Nominees By July

In an interview with Fox News, Trump said would consider “wonderful, conservative, good, solid, brilliant judges in the form of” the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “I’m going to actually lay them out. I’m going to discuss people ... I think before the convention. I want to put 10, 12, 15 names of the type of people that we’d like,” he said.

“From that list, I would choose.”

Huffington Post Politics
Trump To Name Supreme Court Nominees By July

Tim Ahmann and Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Eric Walsh

In an apparent effort to placate conservatives back before he locked down the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump said he would release a list of 5-10 potential Supreme Court within the next week. That was 51 days ago.

In an interview with Fox News Thursday evening, Trump pushed out this deadline even further. After host Bret Baier asked if Trump would release his list before the Republican National Convention in July, the real estate mogul offered a noncommittal response. He now says that “I think” the list will be released “before the convention.”

It’s a fairly minor flip-flop, but it fits a pattern that emerged almost immediately after Trump appeared to clinch his party’s nomination Tuesday evening. On his first full day as the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump reversed his position on the minimum wage and said that he is “not necessarily a huge fan” of his own tax plan.…

Think Progress
Trump Is Flip-Flopping On His Potential SCOTUS Nominee, Too

Ian Millhiser

Jacob Heilbrunn — A New Conspiracy Theory: Obama Murdered Scalia

This time it's not "Putin did it." Now it is, "Obama did it."

The National Interest
A New Conspiracy Theory: Obama Murdered Scalia
Jacob Heilbrunn

Dara Lind — Read Justice Ginsburg’s moving tribute to her “best buddy” Justice Scalia

Respect versus reality show. The American public likes a reality show, so that's what they get.

VOX
Read Justice Ginsburg’s moving tribute to her “best buddy” Justice Scalia

Dara Lind

Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Warren: Republicans risk threatening "our democracy itself" over Supreme Court seat

Brad DeLong — Scott Lemieux on How Nino Scalia Tried to Turn Jurisprudence into Partisan Professional Wrestling

Scott Lemieux:
"No discussion of Scalia’s legacy, for instance, can ignore the 2000 decision Bush v Gore, in which the court issued an essentially lawless decision awarding the presidency to the Republican candidate. Scalia did not write the opinion of the Court, but he wrote the more nakedly partisan opinion that preceded it and has defended it aggressively defended it in public ever since.… 

"…had Scalia’s dissents ultimately shaped America, women would not have reproductive rights, the federal government could not effectively regulate health care, LGBT people would not have the right engage in sexual intercourse without fear of arrest – let alone alone the right to marry – and states could single them out for legal disabilities. Women could be excluded from state educational institutions, public schools could teach creationism in science classes and prisoners could be assaulted by prison guards. And, in large part because of Scalia, in America today, the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, the rights of employees and consumers have been curtailed, Brown v Board is more likely to be used to stop integration than to promote it and moneyed interests increasingly dominate elections....

"In a very real sense, the 2016 elections will ultimately result in the confirmation or repudiation of the jurisprudence for which Justice Scalia most prominently advocated…"

Grasping Reality
Weekend Reading: Scott Lemieux on How Nino Scalia Tried to Turn Jurisprudence into Partisan Professional Wrestling
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

See also

Live from [Fill in the Blank:] Nino Scalia: "I think it is very facile for people to say... ...‘Oh, torture is ter...

Live from [Fill in the Blank:] Nino Scalio in... Wonkette: Antonin Scalia Has Magic Jesus Constitution: "Nino Scali...

Breaking — US Supreme Court Justice Scalia dead at age 79

Shocker. RIP.

BBC
US Supreme Court Justice Scalia dies

The Guardian
Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies at 79

Justice Scalia on the need to integrate social, political and economic liberalism in treating legal rights and responsibilities. This is key because many paradoxes of liberalism arise from it.

Marginal Revolution
Antonin Scalia on economic rights
Tyler Cowen

The corpse is still warm and the fight has already begun. Disgusting.

The dynamics of the presidential race make it likely that the other Republican contenders will have to follow Cruz's lead, and with the GOP presidential field unanimously opposed to allowing Obama to fill the vacancy it will be difficult for Senate Republicans to defy them. The small number of Republicans representing blue states may break from the pack, but pressure on the leadership to block confirmation will be intense.

VOX
Ted Cruz and other conservatives are arguing Obama shouldn't get to replace Justice Scalia
Updated by Matthew Yglesias

McConnell, who is the leader of the Republican-controlled Senate, doesn't outright say that if Obama nominates someone that he and other Senate Republicans would refuse to confirm her. But that threat is strongly implied in "this vacancy should not be filled."

Senate Democrats, for their part — including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) — are already saying it would be a "shameful abdication of our constitutional responsibility" to do what McConnell suggests.

I'm waiting for "because Putin."

VOX
Mitch McConnell has no intention of letting Obama replace Scalia
Dara Lind

Martin Pengelly in New York and Ben Jacobs in Greenville, South Carolina

Ian Millhiser — Justice Scalia Is More Conservative Than You Think, And Further To The Right Than He’s Ever Been

A lot of headlines can be found in Jennifer Senior’s remarkable interview with Justice Antonin Scalia — the fact that Scalia almost exclusively reads conservative media, his belief in the Devil, his squeamishness about the fact that Hollywood depicts “ladies” saying the “F-word.” The interview paints Scalia as an anachronism even among anachronisms. He’s Archie Bunker in a less comfy chair.
Indeed, the justice provides so much candy for headline writers eager to drive up their website’s traffic, that it is easy to miss what is probably the most significant part of the interview — he repudiates his own moderation from a quarter a century ago.

Not surprising. People often get more conservative as they age.

This is the part of the “Lesser Evil” lecture that Scalia abandons in his interview with Ms. Senior. When asked “how fainthearted” he truly is, Scalia responds “I described myself as that a long time ago. I repudiate that.” And lest there be any doubt, that means he would permit flogging — “what I would say now is, yes, if a state enacted a law permitting flogging, it is immensely stupid, but it is not unconstitutional.”

This repudiation is not entirely surprising — while Scalia has not upheld flogging, he did join a dissent siding with three prison guards who handcuffed a prisoner to a hitching post in the hot sun and denied him water. Nevertheless, his explicit willingness to sanction injustices he would have halted as a younger man provides reveals a great deal about his approach to the law in his later years.

Not just the Tea Party that's crazy.

Think Progress
Justice Scalia Is More Conservative Than You Think, And Further To The Right Than He’s Ever Been
Ian Millhiser