Five radical changes Scalia’s death will bring about

With the sudden passing away of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia the entire dynamic of election 2016 has radically changed.

The president is supposed to nominate a replacement and the Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to hold hearings and then vote on a successor. What will happen now?

First of all, the confirmation process will suck a lot of oxygen out of the media. President Barack Obama appears ready to nominate a successor and the Republicans have already drawn a line in the snow saying that a replacement must wait until a new president occupies the White House. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, which holds the hearings and votes nominees up or down and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have so stated. If the president nominates someone Republicans will block any Obama justice given the divisive climate in this nation. The Republicans, of course, control the Senate because the Democrats have been a party of bad candidates or horribly managed Senate campaigns. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Second, there are numerous cases before the court, which are very important on issues such as religion, abortion, same-sex marriage, and labor union rights. There have been some extraordinary Scalia opinions for example on the execution of mentally disabled or teenage prisoners which he felt was OK, the Miranda Rights that police need to read to people arrested which he opposed, sodomy laws which he felt were OK, and his opposition to affirmative action. In the Scalia-less court there are four liberals or moderates and four conservatives. The court has nine members so that there can never be a tied vote. This means that in many of these cases there will be no resolution, no decision because there is no tiebreaker because the court has divided 4-5 on almost every major case in the recent history of this court.

Third, the 'balance” on the Supreme Court is one of the most crucial legal and political events in American public life. Democrats see an opening here to re-shift the balance of the court to a more progressive set point. Republicans need to have a hard-core conservative fill this slot in order to preserve the Scalia legacy of his text-based, originalist, 18th Century, Federalist Papers-centered rulings, and fundamentalist constitutional ideas rather than basing their decisions on Congressional actions. In other words he believed that the court in its rulings and deliberations should look at the actual Constitution as a law and the writings of the time as the Constitution was being shaped and formulated in Philadelphia.

Fourth, because a replacement for Scalia is so consequential there will be endless weighing in on which presidential candidate of either party would make the strongest case for a new court appointment. Would Hillary Clinton choose a more 'acceptable” and 'establishment” justice than the Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders? Can voters trust Donald Trump to pick a conservative replacement to Scalia? Would Ted Cruz choose someone so far to the right that it would be a risk to the future legitimacy of the court? Would one of the 'establishment” candidates such as Bush or Rubio make a 'safer” choice for the nation?

Fifth, because the court is the ultimate referee of American policy both Democrats and Republicans will be energized in this election season. My guess is that voter turnout in November will be one of the largest as a percentage of eligible voters in U.S. history.

The death of Justice Scalia has an impact of this political campaign as big or greater than the terrorist attacks in Paris had when they unfolded.

This changes everything.

' Steffen Schmidt is professor of political science at Iowa State University. Comments: steffenschmidt2005@gmail.com