A fierce political battle shaped up over the future of the US Supreme Court on Saturday, with President Donald Trump saying he would quickly name a successor to liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - a move that would tip the court further to the right.
"We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices," Mr Trump said on Twitter. "We have this obligation, without delay!"
Ms Ginsburg, the senior liberal justice, died on Friday night at age 87 due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer after 27 years on the court. Her death gives Mr Trump, who is seeking re-election on 3 November, a chance to expand the court's conservative majority to 6-3 at a time of a gaping political divide in America.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Mr Trump said the replacement will "most likely" be a woman and that the selection process would "go very quickly".
“We want to respect the process,” he said. “I think it’s going to go very quickly, actually.”
Mr Trump's short list of potential nominees includes two women jurists: Amy Coney Barrett and Barbara Lagoa, according to a source close to the White House.
Democrats are still seething over the Republican Senate's refusal to act on Democratic President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016 after conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died 10 months before that election.
Despite that anger, Democrats have little chance of blocking Mr Trump's pick. His fellow Republicans control 53 of the Senate's 100 seats and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - who has made confirmation of Trump's federal judicial nominees a top priority - said the chamber would vote on any Trump nominee.
Mr Obama himself on Saturday called on Senate Republicans to honour what he called that "invented" 2016 principle.
"A basic principle of the law - and of everyday fairness - is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what's convenient or advantageous in the moment," Mr Obama said in a statement posted online. "The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle."
Republican US Senator Susan Collins said on Saturday the Senate should not fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court until after the 3 November presidential election, and the winner of that race should pick the nominee.
Ms Collins, who is in a tough re-election battle in Maine, said in a statement that "in fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the president or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the president who is elected on November 3".
Ms Collins is the first Republican senator to suggest the nomination should be tied to who wins the White House.
Republicans control the Senate with a 53-47 majority.
Senator Lisa Murkowsi, an Alaska Republican, told Alaska Public Radio in an interview shortly before the announcement of Ms Ginsburg's death that she would not vote to confirm a nominee before the election.
Ms Murkowski's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
About seven Republican incumbents and two Democrats face a chance of losing their seats in November's election, according to nonpartisan election trackers.
Potential nominees
Even before Ms Ginsburg's death, Mr Trump had made public a list of potential nominees.
Ms Barrett has generated perhaps the most interest in conservative circles. A devout Roman Catholic, she was a legal scholar at Notre Dame Law School in Indiana before Mr Trump appointed her to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit in 2017.
A Barrett nomination would likely ignite controversy, as her strong conservative religious views have prompted abortion-rights groups to say that if confirmed by the Republican-led US Senate, she would likely vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion nationwide.
Ms Lagoa has served on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals for less than a year after being appointed by Mr Trump and confirmed by the Senate on an 80-15 vote. Prior to that she also spent less than a year in her previous position as the first Latina to serve on the Florida Supreme Court. She previously spent more than a decade as a judge on an intermediate appeals court in Florida.
Donald Trump said he will "most likely" pick a woman to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Source: AP
Conservative activists for years have sought to get enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. During the 2016 campaign, Mr Trump promised to appoint justices who would overturn that decision. But the court in July, even with its conservative majority, struck down a restrictive Louisiana abortion law on a 5-4 vote.
The two justices already appointed by Mr Trump were Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Mr Kavanaugh's confirmation process was particularly heated, as he faced accusations by a California university professor, Christine Blasey Ford, that he had sexually assaulted her in 1982 when the two were high school students in Maryland. Mr Kavanaugh angrily denied those accusations and was narrowly confirmed.
