President Obama to Skip Funeral for Justice Scalia

It can hold at least 3,500 people.

The ceremony was led by Scalia’s son, the Rev. Paul Scalia.

“God blessed Dad with a deep Catholic faith”, the younger Scalia told the gathering inside the cathedral.

Melissa Covey, a legal assistant from Virginia, was in line behind the teenagers and said she wanted to pay her respects to a man she views as a legal giant.

A staunch conservative and the court’s longest-serving member, Justice Scalia died last Saturday at age 79 at a Texas hunting resort, sparking a political struggle that promises to reshape the 2016 election campaigns. He had spent almost three decades on the high court.

Burial plans have not been released, but court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said it would be closed to press coverage.

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, was the last member of the high court to lie in repose.

Why should Obama try to fight it out with the Republicans to get a nominee with the clock ticking toward the end of his presidency, when an alternative strategy increases his chances that he will be appointed to be the next Supreme Court justice?

Scalia’s flag-draped casket rested on a funeral bier that first held President Abraham Lincoln’s casket after his assassination.

Now Obama himself is being accused of ill manners and worse for skipping Scalia’s funeral on February 20.

Scalia’s son Christopher wrote in a remembrance in the Washington Post on Saturday that his father loved opera, classical music and the New York Yankees.

Throughout the day, four former clerks to the late justice will stand watch by the casket at all times, circulating through in 30-minute shifts.

YouGov’s research shows that just over half of Americans (53%) are hostile to the arguments that Obama should wait to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, welcomed the congregation to what he joked was a “simple parish family mass”. Justice Clarence Thomas said, “It is hard to imagine the court without my friend”.

“The Constitution is pretty clear about what’s supposed to happen now”, Obama said before returning to Washington from California.

“Even when dinner conversation proceeded “um”-free, it could still descend into another of Dad’s favorite pastimes: crumpling his napkin into a ball and throwing it into one of our glasses”, Christopher Scalia wrote”. Trump made similar comments to conservative radio host Michael Savage on Tuesday. His final order as a Supreme Court justice came when he denied a plea for a stay of execution in the case of a man sentenced to death after being convicted of the 1990 murder of a liquor store clerk.