PREVIEW - Trump To Announce Supreme Court Pick To Cement Conservative Majority Before Election

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th September, 2020) US President Donald Trump is set to announce his nominee to fill a recently-vacated Supreme Court seat, a move that is widely expected to cement the bench's like-minded conservative majority ahead of the November 3 election, and for decades to come.

A successor to the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eulogized as a liberal icon, is being chosen from an undisclosed list of five women and upon an announcement will be submitted for confirmation to the Senate controlled by Trump's own Republican party and already mobilized for a speedy vote.

Trump has made no secret of his desire to have a sympathetic edge at the Supreme Court before November 3 as it may have a final say in determining the outcome of a highly competitive 2020 US Presidential election. The incumbent has repeatedly accused the Democratic opposition of plotting a scam by using mail-in ballots to tilt the vote count in their favor.

The 87-year-old Ginsburg, one of the nine judges on the Supreme Court, died on September 18 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Before her passing, the court was already stacked with a 5-4 conservative majority, but some justices like John Roberts have often ruled in agreement with the liberal justices.

The move by Trump and his Republicans to rush and fill her seat six weeks before the election is being hotly contested by Democrats. They argue that President Barack Obama was prevented from doing the same when another Supreme Court judge, Antonin Scalia, died in 2016 before that year's presidential election.

Trump, who won that race, now faces Obama's former vice president Joe Biden, a Democrat who is leading in the polls - both nationally and in key swing states - for the upcoming election.

Apart from electoral considerations, a lifetime appointment means that the US Supreme Court will be dominated by the conservatives for decades, whose Weltanschauung may impact justices' rulings on most fundamental and divisive issues.