America needs a full Supreme Court so that the election outcome is not a 4-4 decision if it comes to a decision
For the good of the country, the President must make a nomination and the Senate must confirm
The time between the formal Supreme Court nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor and her final Senate confirmation was 33 days. (Aug. 19-Sep. 21, 1981).
For John Paul Stevens, the formal process took only 19 days (Nov. 28-Dec. 17, 1975).
There are 46 days until the election.
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Choosing not to fill a vacancy would be a historically unprecedented act of unilateral disarmament.
If a Supreme Court vacancy opens up between now and the end of the year, Republicans should fill it. Given the vital importance of the Court to rank-and-file Republican voters and grassroots activists, particularly in the five-decade-long quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would be political suicide for Republicans to refrain from filling a vacancy unless some law or important traditional norm was against them. There is no such law and no such norm; those are all on their side. Choosing not to fill a vacancy would be a historically unprecedented act of unilateral disarmament. It has never happened once in all of American history. There is no chance that the Democrats, in the same position, would ever reciprocate, as their own history illustrates.
Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.
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Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/history-is-on-the-side-of-republicans-filling-a-supreme-court-vacancy-in-2020