WASHINGTON, D.C. Feb. 14 (DPI) – The death this weekend of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will only intensify the stakes in the 2016 election, as it’s unlikely that President Obama will get any replacement even considered by a partisan Republican-controlled congress by November.

Meanwhile, popular reader comments online, to a surprising degree, were almost welcoming of Scalia’s death – at least on leftist bastion NYTimes.com. Thousands of readers weighed in on the 79-year-old justice’s death, the cause apparently a heart attack, at a Texas retreat Saturday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/antonin-scalia-death.html

The top three recommended reader comments, of nearly 2500, attached to Adam Liptak’s report Saturday:

Truly objective legal interpretation is mostly a myth (personal preferences always inform decisions), but Scalia was atypical in his willingness to disregard any legal principle he had previously enunciated if it conflicted with his own partisan agenda, and uniquely rude and offensive in the language he used to do so. My condolences to his loved ones, but his presence on the Court will not be missed.

President Obama gets to put a justice on the court. He has a full year left in his term. The notion being pushed by Republican demogogues like Cruz and political hacks and fatuous pundits that the country should “wait for the next president” is outrageous and without precedent. Their arrogance and disrespect toward this president knows no bounds. Obama was elected for eight years, not seven. This is a nondebatable fact of constitutional law. Period.

This is a wonderful opportunity for President Obama to return some sense of balance to the Supreme Court by appointing someone who doesn’t hold the extreme, activist, radical right views of Scalia.

Scalia, appointed to the court in 1986 by Ronald Reagan, been a bulwark of conservative jurisprudence, and the closest thing the court has had in recent years to a strict constructionist interpreting the Constitution.