Justice Anton Scalia Reportedly Found Dead At Texas Resort

@revelette2,

Above his head. Above and over has caused me troubles in barber shops regarding hair and ears, let me tell you!

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@revelette2,

Nothing wrong. If this were the second year of this term, this would be exactly who he would nominate and it would sail through. A President of one party with a Senate controlled by the other is going to have to put forward a moderate.

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@engineer,

I need a break from here, been here too long today, but, I read from ehbeth something like Obama was saving him for a more contentious time. Guess he overthought it.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

He is also Jewish, does that count for him or against him?

Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg are Jewish. The rest are Catholic.

revelette2 wrote:

I don't see what is so bad about having an IVY league education

The problem isn't that Garland went to Harvard, it's that every other justice on the supreme court also went to either Harvard or Yale. There is a troubling uniformity of judicial backgrounds among the members of the court that Garland's nomination only exacerbates.

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@joefromchicago,

Hey, they could use some attorneys from Chicago campuses - some great schools there.

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@joefromchicago,

Forgive me for being obtuse, but why is it troubling or surprising that supreme court justices come from those criteria you listed? Hasn't it always been that way or is it something new?

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@revelette2,

I will butt in and say there are many highly regarded universities in the country.
The Supremes are, though, zoned as part of a (seeming) club.

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@engineer,

Quote:

An eventual appointment for Garland is also less likely to mark a liberal shift in the Supreme Court. If anything, his contributions -- given his age and his moderate record so far -- are likely to be more pragmatic than path-marking for some of the country's most hotly contested legal issues, such as voting rights, gun control and the scope of presidential powers.

I haven't checked with the NRA yet, but I'm already hearing that this guy hates the Second Amendment with a passion.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

Forgive me for being obtuse, but why is it troubling or surprising that supreme court justices come from those criteria you listed? Hasn't it always been that way or is it something new?

It's relatively new. The court used to have members from all sorts of diverse backgrounds, such as former elected officials (Earl Warren, Hugo Black), state supreme court judges (Sandra Day O'Connor), and people who actually served as trial court judges (David Souter). Occasionally someone might even slip through who had no judicial or elective experience before (Lewis Powell). In contrast, none of the current supreme court members has ever served on a state court, as an elected official, or as a trial court judge. And this is a court, we should remember, that is constantly telling state courts, elected officials, and trial court judges how to do their jobs.

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

I haven't checked with the NRA yet, but I'm already hearing that this guy hates the Second Amendment with a passion.

Yep. NRA stands opposed.

http://www.nraila.org/articles/20160316/nra-opposes-nomination-of-merrick-garland-to-the-us-supreme-court

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Linda Greenhouse has a piece up at the NYT on the oh so predictable "Bork!" clamor.

"Even allowing for fading memories, there is a good deal of misinformation being thrown around about what actually happened in 1987. “Senate Democrats and a few Republicans united to filibuster the nomination,” according to a recent story in the conservative Washington Examiner. Not so. It was as far from a filibuster as is possible to imagine. Despite having voted 9 to 5 to reject the nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Judge Bork’s name to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote, which the White House and the nominee insisted on. The vote was 58 to 42 to reject the nomination. There was never the hint of a filibuster.

The confirmation hearing itself, presided over by Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, lasted for a spellbinding week. The senators questioned Judge Bork extensively about his academic writing, his speeches and his opinions for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which President Reagan had appointed him (along with Antonin Scalia) as a justice-in-waiting. Judge Bork answered their questions, at length. His problem wasn’t that he didn’t get a chance to explain himself. It was that a majority of the Senate, including six Republicans who voted against him, didn’t like what he said." http://nyti.ms/1WsEteW

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@Joe
That's a very interesting point. How to do you attribute this modern narrowed set of candidates' backgrounds?

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

@Joe
That's a very interesting point. How to do you attribute this modern narrowed set of candidates' backgrounds?

I'm not sure I understand your question. If you're asking how we came to this situation, it's the result of a variety of factors. I think it can be traced back to Reagan, who was the first president who intentionally chose nominees in their 40s and early 50s because he wanted them to serve as long as possible on the court. In that, he largely succeeded (one of his nominees just recently died). But in order to get those younger nominees confirmed, they needed to have some particularly glittering judicial bona fides that would compensate for their relative lack of experience. That meant getting federal appellate judges who went to the best law schools. Not coincidentally, the Federalist Society had a bunch of guys who met those qualifications. And they were all guys - when Reagan wanted to put a woman on the court, he had to reach down to the Arizona appellate court for Sandra Day O'Connor (I earlier said she served on the Arizona supreme court - that was incorrect).

So that set the template. Apart from O'Connor, Reagan's nominees (including Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg) more-or-less followed that template (Bork was 60 when he was nominated, but his nomination was payback for his role in the Saturday Night Massacre). Scalia was 50 when nominated; Ginsburg was 41; Kennedy was 51. Bush gave us more of the same with Souter and Thomas, and the pattern was set for Clinton, Bush II, and now Obama. The one nominee who broke the pattern - Harriet Miers - was so manifestly unfit for the job that nobody has deviated from the script since then.

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@joefromchicago,

Ok, I understand and thank you for explaining it to me. However, given all that is true, does that mean we should not want the latest pick for supreme court because he is too uniformly elite? Didn't I hear Garland served as a prosecutor? Looked it up, he presided over the Oklahoma bombing and Unabomber cases.

Obama nominates Merrick Garland to Supreme Court

As such, it would seem to me he would have some experience with actual trial cases if not a judge.

However, perhaps it won't be so bad if the republicans refuse to consider him. Since he is so admired by republicans, perhaps it is more or less an election gambit.

Quote:

As appeals court judge, Garland issued an opinion denying Guantanamo detainees from seeking relief in US civil courts.

From above.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

Ok, I understand and thank you for explaining it to me. However, given all that is true, does that mean we should not want the latest pick for supreme court because he is too uniformly elite?

That would be one of the reasons.

revelette2 wrote:

Didn't I hear Garland served as a prosecutor? Looked it up, he presided over the Oklahoma bombing and Unabomber cases.

Yes, he was employed by the justice department, which means that the federal government was his client. The senate should be especially concerned about the number of former executive-branch employees who are being nominated to the supreme court. It should be, but it isn't.

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@joefromchicago,

OK, thanks. You did understand my question as I intended it to be read.

You understand this universe much better than I. I'd recognized the youthfulness aspect and understood the reason for that. My presumption on nominees chosen was a two-fold set of criteria - judicial bona fides and a past history of rulings and writings which would be so meager that any political ideology held would be difficult to discern with clarity and thus difficult to attack - that is, individuals unlike Bork.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

My presumption on nominees chosen was a two-fold set of criteria - judicial bona fides and a past history of rulings and writings which would be so meager that any political ideology held would be difficult to discern with clarity and thus difficult to attack - that is, individuals unlike Bork.

That was something of an unintended benefit. Remember that Scalia was nominated before Bork, so the template had already been set when Bork was nominated. And when Republicans saw that Bork's writings were being used against him in the senate hearings, they realized that it was a benefit to have someone with no paper trail at all. They soon found out that it was also important that the nominee not smoke weed with his students. But it was Clarence Thomas who really set the standard for inscrutability - not only did he have no judicial record of any consequence, he skillfully managed to avoid answering any questions regarding his judicial philosophy at his hearings. Of course, when Bush Jr. nominated an entirely blank slate in Harriet Miers, that proved to come with its own set of problems.

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Justice Anton Scalia Reportedly Found Dead At Texas Resort

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