IT HAS been 11 years since an American Supreme Court justice has died while on the bench. And the death of that judge, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, had much narrower political and legal repercussions than the surprise demise of Antonin Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice and most acerbic conservative, who has died in his sleep, promises to. In 2005, George W. Bush was simply able to nominate John Roberts, another conservative, to succeed Mr Rehnquist. Barack Obama, now in the last year of his presidency, would love to nominate a justice in the mould of Mr Scalia’s fellow opera-lover, liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Such an appointment could tip the balance on the court decidedly toward the left for a generation or more. But any nominee must be confirmed by the Senate, and with an intransigent Republican majority there, there is no chance Mr Obama would try to do that. Moments after news of Mr Scalia’s death broke on February 13th, Ted Cruz tweeted that the Ronald Reagan nominee “was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next president names his replacement”. This presidential campaign ambulance chasing received a rebuke later in the evening from the current occupant of the White House. After calling Mr Scalia “a larger-than-life presence on the bench” and “a brilliant legal mind” who “influenced a generation of judges, lawyers and students” and will be “remembered as one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court”, Barack Obama pledged to submit a name for the senate’s consideration. “I plan to fulfil my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time”, he said, “and there will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the senate to fulfil its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote”.

The majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, declares he will do no such thing. “The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice”, he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president”. The logic underlying Mr McConnell’s justification for inaction is rather dubious: it would counsel all presidents to sit on their hands when a justice dies or leaves the bench and await the results of the next election. The chair of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, said last night that it has "been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year". Yet the 20th century provides six examples of election-year confirmations, as Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog notes, including the unanimous vote confirming Anthony Kennedy in 1988. Mr Obama has 11 months left in office, nearly a quarter of his second term. If he were to bow to the GOP’s demands, The Nine would be The Eight for the better part of two straight Supreme Court terms.

During the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina on February 13th, John Kasich of Ohio first joined Mr Cruz in saying that Mr Obama should defer the selection of Mr Scalia’s successor to the next president. But in his next breath, Mr Kasich suggested that if Mr Obama does submit a name, it should be one that could receive the unanimous support of senators from both parties. This may, in fact, be Mr Obama’s best strategy. It would be easy for GOP senators to scoff at an ideologically liberal nominee like Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who once taught both Mr Obama and Mr Cruz. But if Mr Obama chose a nominee like Sri Srinivasan, whom he selected for the District of Columbia Circuit Court, America’s second-most powerful judicial tribunal, things would get interesting. Mr Srinivasan, who served in the solicitor general’s office under both George W. Bush and Mr Obama, has no strong ideological stamp. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2013, earning the support of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and all of their colleagues. It would not seem particularly fair-minded for the GOP to write him off as a viable Supreme Court nominee three years later. Yet if Mr McConnell sticks to his guns and follows Mr Cruz’s plea to “stand strong” and agree to confirm only a “principled conservative”, an already highly charged presidential campaign would be electrified by Senate Republicans refusing even to consider a widely respected nominee.

Whatever impact Mr Scalia’s death has on the presidential race, it will undoubtedly have a profound effect on the current Supreme Court term. After decisions last June preventing the implosion of Obamacare and widening marriage laws to gays and lesbians nationwide, this year was supposed to belong to the conservative wing of the court. With cases involving the fate of affirmative action, abortion restrictions, religious liberty, voting rights, immigration and public-sector unions, Justice Scalia would have been almost certain to join his right-leaning brethren in a series of 5-4 defeats for liberal causes. With his death, Mr Scalia’s vote is extinguished, and four votes are not enough to overturn a lower-court ruling.

Raw judicial politics to one side, Justice Scalia leaves a giant hole in the seat he occupied for nearly three decades on the Supreme Court bench. He is well known for having had a tempestuous manner on the bench, which grew more pronounced in recent years. But his legacy as the court's staunchest defender of the jurisprudential theory of originalism and strictly textual approach to interpreting statutes is secure, as is his prickly but intellectually dazzling role as an opinion writer and questioner of lawyers during oral arguments. Whatever else happens, the Supreme Court's day-to-day business is about to get a lot less interesting, even as the politics around it heats up considerably.