Daily US Times: President Donald Trump has said he will name a replacement to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by week’s end and urged the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, to confirm his Supreme Court choice before 3 November.
Mr. Trump has launched a high-stakes battle ahead of the election.
The US President would replace Ginsburg, a liberal stalwart who died on Friday aged 87, with a conservative.
He appears to have secured enough support in the Senate to win approval for his nominee.
This would cement a right-leaning majority on the country’s highest court for decades.
The ideological balance of the nine-member court is crucial to its rulings on the most important issues in US law.
Mr Trump said on Monday that he was “constitutionally obligated” to nominate someone for the Supreme Court.
He told supported at a rally in Ohio: “We’re looking at five incredible jurists… women that are extraordinary in every way. I mean, honestly, it could be anyone of them, and we’re going to be announcing it on Friday or Saturday,”
Earlier, he had a private meeting at the White House with a potential nominee: Amy Coney Barrett, an appeals court judge who is backed by anti-abortion conservatives.
Once the president names a nominee, it is the Senate’s job to vote on whether to confirm them. The Judiciary Committee will review the nominee first, and then vote to send the nominee to the floor for a full vote.
Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader, has vowed to hold a confirmation vote before the election in November. Democrats have accused him of hypocrisy.
Mr McConnell refused to hold a vote to confirm a nominee put forward by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, following the death of conservative justice Anthony Scalia in 2016.
In February that year, Mr Obama had nominated Merrick Garland – months before the election – but Mr McConnell argued that Supreme Court justices should not be approved in an election year.
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