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The U.S. Supreme Court does need a full complement of nine justices. I think we all agree on that. It would not be okay to have 4-4 ties.

The Constitution says the president “shall” appoint justices with the consent of the Senate. Not that he shall only if he has two years or more remaining in office.

There is nothing about “lame duck” status. Many will say Barack Obama is a “lame duck” president because he’s on his last year and cannot re-run. That may have become a common term, but it is incorrect. He’s only a “lame duck” after a new president has been selected in November and takes office in January.

So Obama does have a constitutional mandate to nominate a new SCOTUS justice to succeed the late Antonin Scalia.

Obviously, a sitting president nominates somebody that closely reflects his own interpretation of society’s need for a fair jurist who will best interpret our elderly Constitution that really needs a modern-day revision. But we all know how impossible that would be to pass through Congress and state ratifications. So we chug along with the outdated document and try to apply it to 21st century life.

Using “strict construction” of its ancient words is rather ridiculous in the age of the Internet and same-sex marriage. Trying to imagine what the founders might have meant about mandatory union membership is ridiculous.

So the justices stumble through with the best legal justifications they can find, based on their own upbringings, educations and interpretations.

In that sense, we do sometimes become a nation of men (and women) rather than just a nation of laws.

So we look to legal and practical brilliance to save us. Decisions that draw on the Constitution but also on modern-day common sense, equality and fairness.

We don’t agree if those goals are always met.

I like legal abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the okay to limit coal-fired factories and right-to-work laws. Others do not.

Neither I nor they can find plain language in the Constitution to support our positions. Neither can the court. It has to parse and pretend. We have to accept that or have chaos.

The decisions — in my favor or against — require nine justices, not eight. And we should not have to wait at least a year, maybe two, to fill the court and get majority decisions.

Will an Obama nominee push things in my favor? Maybe, but never guaranteed. Look at Ronald Reagan’s nominations of Sandra Day O’Connor and Arthur Kennedy.

So I say roll the dice, do an up or down Senate vote and move on.

But a rejection of Obama’s nominee would become a central issue in the presidential campaign. Public unhappiness over how the GOP handles this could hand the presidency and the Senate to the Democrats.