What if the President doesn't fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court?

[Del Tachi]

What would happen in the hypothetical scenario of the President refusing to nominate someone to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court?

Does the Congress have any recourse or will SCOTUS just have to function -1 until POTUS eventually gets around to it?

[Never]

Based on Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, it appears that the President can appoint justices when he wants to.

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It doesn't seem as if the President has a time limit in which he has to fill court vacancies. Considering that we have a lower-level court vacancy from 2005, I have my doubts that there is anything that could be done to increase the speed of the nomination process.

If, say, a Supreme Court vacancy came up in the year a President was up for re-election, and the President's party lacked control of the Senate, he could take a risk and wait to fill the vacancy until after the election in hopes of being reelected and having his party take control of the Senate.

[Del Tachi]

It just makes an for an interesting scenario when you have a, let's say, 5-4 conservative/liberal balance on the court and one of the conservative justices retires.  There's a Democratic president and a narrowly Republican Senate.  The Democratic President may be chose to defer nominating a replacement justice because the overall composition of the Court is now much more friendly to liberals.

 

[politicallefty]

It just makes an for an interesting scenario when you have a, let's say, 5-4 conservative/liberal balance on the court and one of the conservative justices retires.  There's a Democratic president and a narrowly Republican Senate.  The Democratic President may be chose to defer nominating a replacement justice because the overall composition of the Court is now much more friendly to liberals.

That is what effectively happened after Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1968. LBJ had nominated Justice Abe Fortas to be elevated to Chief Justice. He was filibustered in October of that year and promptly withdrew. (At that point, there obviously was not enough time for LBJ to nominate and have confirmed a successor.) Many consider that to be the precedent for the tactics that currently rule judicial nominations.