Court Reporter
Interesting discussion of who'll be who on the Supreme Court over at SCOTUSBLOG. They claim Stevens will retire this year but not, as often claimed, Ginsburg.
So there'll be at least one opening for the present Congress. The President will choose candidates based on how he thinks they'll vote (which is actually pretty predictable--Scotusblog doesn't pretend judges vote on principle unnaffected by politics), how the Senate will vote and how many years they'll serve. There's also a slight calculation on how much Republicans can run against the nominee.
Scotusblog discusses many of the usual suspects: Diane Wood, Elena Kagan, Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, Cass Sunstein, Deval Patrick, Jennifer Granholm and Amy Klobuchar. I'd only take seriously the first three names. The rest are too controversial or too political (and one or two might--might--be a maverick), even if they'd likely succeed in the Senate.
So I agree with Scotusblog that the easy frontrunner is Kagan, the youngest and most politically attractive one in the bunch. Though I wish he'd take Wood because I very vaguely know her.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:07 AM
3 Comments:
The nomination depends on whether its made to this Congress or the next one and the next one depends on the outcome of to November elections.
If the elections were held next month, Obama wouldn't nominate any of those people. However, I think there will be a wild pendulum ride (back and forth a couple of times) between now and November and while I think maybe one or two or those folks may someday be nominated, I'm betting the first nominee won't be any of them- that is to say, an unknown candidate at the moment that no attack machine has had any prep for
I think the argument for Kagan made at SCOTUSBLOG is very convincing. I would even applaud the nomination, in the sense that I believe Kagan may be a stealth centrist (in the Souter mode) who might line-up with the Roberts side of the court from time to time.
Of course I carry a stupid grudge against Diane Wood, who was my Civ Pro professor, and whom I don't think was a very good teacher. However, Judges are not required to be teachers, so I'm probably overly-harsh in my estimation of her suitability for the position.
Stevens is old, very old, but the belief is he's retiring now before Congress gets more conservative. That's also the reason some were guessing Ginsburg would retire. Both figured they could hold out a few more years, but now that it looks like Republicans will have more say, they're running scared.
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