Let our next president choose new justice

Is there an invented "right" to appoint Supreme Court justices?

Are Obama's partisans correct in asserting it is Obama's "right" to nominate someone to fill the seat left vacant by Justice Scalia's untimely death, and that the Senate must obediently confirm that nominee?

We're still paying the price for the Borking of Robert Bork by Democrats in 1987. Before his confirmation hearings, Robert Bork had been renowned at Yale Law School. After the hearings, Bork became a caricature of legal conservatism, paralleling the tone set by Edward Kennedy's during the hearing when he viciously attacked Robert Bork.

Hence, the "Borking of Bork" was the beginning of the polarization of the confirmation process that has turned our courts into partisan war zones.

But even before the deplorable 1987 Borking of Bork, Democrats passed in 1960 a resolution known as "Expressing the Sense of the Senate" (S.RES. 334) by a vote of 48-33 in an attempt to prevent former President Dwight Eisenhower from filling a seat last-minute.

Now that Obama occupies the White House and is facing GOP Senate opposition to appointing a new Supreme Court justice in the mere months before a new president is elected, he seems to have changed his tune a decade after serving as a U.S. senator.

Obama used to think it was appropriate for senators (including himself) to block judicial nominees. In fact, he filibustered Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court along with circuit court nominees Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Leslie Southwick.

The Constitution grants a president the right to recommend a Supreme Court appointee; however, the Constitution likewise gives the Senate power through the confirmation process to stop the process.

It must be left up to the American people to decide who the next judge will be, via our next president.

Nancy J. Thorner

Lake Bluff