@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:
Robert Reich wrote:
My mole in the White House tells me Obama will nominate 46-year-old Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American jurist who Obama nominated in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- and the Senate confirmed unanimously.
...
My suspicion is Obama couldn't do better than Srinivasan. No other nominee with get a majority of Senate votes. What do you think?
I think it would be a poor choice. A safe choice, but a poor one. The supreme court has, in the past several decades, become less diverse. Not in terms of sex or race, but in terms of judicial backgrounds. All of the current members of the SC went to either Harvard or Yale law school, all but one served on either the DC circuit or 2d Circuit, and five of the eight served, at some point, in the executive branch of government.
That last fact should be of some concern to the senators whose job it is to "advise" the president on judicial nominations. The erosion of legislative power is a real threat, and having a bunch of former executive-branch apparatchiks on the supreme court bench probably isn't the best way to curtail that threat.
Srinivasan is, in the above respects, a conventional choice for the SC. Served on the DC circuit? Check. Served in the executive branch? Check. Went to Harvard? No, amazingly, he went to Stanford! I guess that would make him the diversity hire.
Srinivasan certainly doesn't look like the current SC membership, but that kind of diversity is only skin deep. In terms of his judicial
bona fides, he's just like the rest of them. That would make him a safe, boring, and, ultimately, poor choice for the court, which is why I fully expect that Obama will select him.