Last week, President Obama announced his nominee for the Supreme Court. While the president has every constitutional right to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, the Senate also has every constitutional right not to confirm.

As a member of the House of Representatives, I do not have a vote to confirm or reject the president’s nominee, but I agree with my Senate colleagues that the next Supreme Court justice should be selected by the next president.

This is not about the nominee. This is about the process.

We should not be setting a precedent of a president starting the nomination process for a new Supreme Court nominee in the last months of his term. Lame ducks should not make lifetime appointments.

Some Democrats may argue this case is similar to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s confirmation in 1988, but the two scenarios are very different. The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Justice Kennedy in 1988 (Reagan’s final year), but he was nominated in 1987.

Furthermore, Justice Kennedy was Reagan’s third nominee for the vacancy, following Senate Democrats’ rejection of Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg. President Reagan started the nomination process roughly halfway through his second term, whereas President Obama is starting this nomination process in his final year.

The process dragged out because President Reagan was replacing a swing vote, Justice Lewis Powell, and Democrats didn’t want a lame-duck president to have the opportunity to dramatically alter the makeup of the court.

This nomination could very well alter the balance of the Supreme Court, leading to radical legal and policy shifts in the United States.

With an election now in full swing, the Senate should wait and let the American people decide who they want to select our next Supreme Court justice.

THE WEEK IN WASHINGTON

We have received widespread reports of atrocities committed by ISIS against Christians, Yezidis and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East, including crucifixions, beheadings, kidnappings and even young girls being forced into sex slavery.

On March 14, the House voted unanimously to pass a resolution I co-sponsored declaring these atrocities as genocide. Three days later, the Obama administration followed suit in declaring these atrocities genocide and ethnic cleansing.

My hope is that this declaration will represent a turning point for the administration in terms of providing real global leadership to bring these atrocities to an end, rather than a PR statement just to meet a deadline.

You may recall President Obama’s unconstitutional executive action on immigration, which protected up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation through prosecutorial discretion. Shortly after the president announced his program, 25 states filed suit against the action, arguing that it violates the Separation of Powers principle of the Constitution.

In other words, this was an example of the executive branch trying to write the laws, when only the legislative branch has the authority to do so.

Lower courts agreed President Obama had overreached his authority, and the case is now before the Supreme Court. Only in very rare circumstances can the U.S. House of Representatives file amicus briefs in court cases, but this case meets those circumstances.

So on Thursday, the House passed House Resolution 639, which authorizes Speaker Paul Ryan to appear as amicus curiae (friend of the court) on behalf of the House of Representatives and argue against the president’s executive overreach.

Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-Charlotte, represents North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.

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Robert Pittenger

Contributing Columnist