President Barack Obama on Wednesday nominated Merrick Garland, 63, as the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, he has supervised the investigations in the Unabomber case as well as the Oklahoma City bombing as a Justice Department lawyer.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has joined fellow Democrats and advocacy groups calling on Senate Republicans to give President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a confirmation hearing and timely vote. It is my hope that all Senators will show the American people that they respect the President of the United States, the Constitution, and Chief Judge Garland enough to do the same.
Mr. Obama praised him as “not only one of America’s sharpest legal minds”, but someone who has “a spirit of decency, modesty, integrity, even-handedness and excellence”.
If confirmed, Garland would replace former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a New Jersey native who died in February.
The White House did not immediately confirm the identity of the nominee, but Obama said the person was “eminently qualified”.
The centrist judge, who hails from Obama’s home town of Chicago, now serves as the chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia – a post he took over in 2013. “In fact, I would place him at the top of the list”, Hatch said at the time, according to Congressional records.
Inhofe voted in 1997 to confirm Garland to the D.C. appeals court.
On the other side, liberal contributor Julie Roginsky, describing Garland as a “moderate” justice in the mold of Anthony Kennedy, said Republicans “better be darn sure that Donald Trump will win and that they’re going to hold their Senate majority”.
Kirk says it’s the Senate’s “constitutionally defined role to provide advice and consent” and that’s “as important as the president’s role in proposing a nominee”.
A Supreme Court nomination, Obama said, is “supposed to be above politics, it has to be, and should stay that way”. “For more than eighty years, there has not been a nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice in a presidential election year and now is not the time to break with bipartisan practice”. He was confirmed with a 76-23 vote. “Senators must fight this until the American people have an opportunity to put in place conservatives who, like Justice Scalia, understand the basic principles of liberty and freedom as enshrined in our Constitution by our Founders from this nation’s very beginning”, said Senate candidaie Todd Wilcox.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, said the issue is not the nominee, but the process in which the voters should have a say.
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There had been speculation that Obama would choose a minority candidate to succeed Scalia on the high court, including federal appellate judge Sri Srinivasan, who would have become the first Asian-American nominee.
