Merrick Garland.
WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to announce on Wednesday that he is nominating Merrick Garland, the chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, to serve as the next associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a Democratic source told BuzzFeed News, in a nomination that Republicans have said is going nowhere.
The president will make the announcement official during a speech in the White House rose garden at 11 a.m. ET.
"I’ve devoted a considerable amount of time and deliberation to this decision," the president said in a statement previewing the announcement early Wednesday. "I’ve consulted with legal experts and people across the political spectrum, both inside and outside government."
"I’m confident you’ll share my conviction that this American is not only eminently qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice, but deserves a fair hearing, and an up-or-down vote."
There will now be an actual person — and potential Supreme Court justice — at the center of the debate that began when Justice Antonin Scalia died on Feb. 13.
Garland, 63, is a surprising pick from a president who has discussed his desire to remake the federal courts — both in terms of traditional diversity but also in terms of experiential diversity.
Garland in 2008.
Charles Dharapak / AP
Garland has the quintessential Supreme Court nominee resume. After growing up in Illinois, he attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School; clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan; became a partner at Arnold & Porter; and worked in the Clinton Justice Department, eventually overseeing the prosecutions of the Oklahoma City bombing and of the Unabomber.
Clinton initially nominated Garland for the D.C. Circuit in 1995, but his nomination initially stalled over a dispute not involving Garland himself. After being renominated in 1997, he was quickly confirmed on a 76-23 vote — with support from 31 Republicans — in a Republican-led Senate. Garland has served as the chief judge of the circuit since 2013.
In 2010, when Garland was under consideration for the vacancy to be created by Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement, SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein put the facts there — with a Democratic-led Senate — bluntly: “[T]o the extent that the President's goal is to select a nominee who will articulate a broad progressive vision for the law, Judge Garland would be a very unlikely candidate to take up that role.”
Over at National Review, the prospect of Garland’s nomination this time around was challenged by Carrie Severino, who pointed to the judge’s prior vote seeking to have the full appeals court reconsider a three-judge panel’s decision striking down a D.C. handgun ban ordinance as a sign that he is “not so moderate.”
In the days after Scalia’s death, his majority opinion for the sharply divided 5-4 Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller — striking down the handgun ban after the District had appealed the D.C. Circuit ruling in a decision holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms — was often pointed to as one of his most significant opinions.
Obama will now press an uphill — if not unlikely — battle to have Merrick Garland replace Scalia on the bench.
Garland’s nomination starts off differently than any other in modern American history.
Unlike any Supreme Court nominee since the practice began, the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have — on party lines — stated that they do not intend to hold a hearing, let alone a vote, on the nominee. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, was wavered on this point, but appears to have settled, at least for the time being, on opposing any consideration of any nominee, hewing to the Republican line that has emerged since Scalia’s death that the November elections will enable the people to decide who they want nominating Scalia’s successor.
As Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, acknowledged this past week, however, the committee was setting a “new rule” that “in the last year — at least of a lame-duck, eight-year term, I would say it’s going to be a four-year term — that you’re not going to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.”
The nomination also will be moving forward or, more likely (at least at first), be stalled in the middle of ongoing sharp presidential primary contests, as well as a looming general election fight for the presidency. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have strongly backed Obama’s prerogative to pick a nominee and criticized the Senate Republicans’ peremptory response to the vacancy. Conversely, both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, as Graham noted, have asked the Senate not to proceed on any Obama nominee for the vacancy.
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1Z0fj9a
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