President Obama could announce his pick for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee as early as Wednesday, according to reports.
Advertisement
Sources familiar with the selection process said on Friday Kelly was not among the final three under consideration, federal appeals court judges Sri Srinivasan, Merrick Garland and Paul Watford.
Amy Brundage, a former White House aide helping to organize the Democratic communications push, said the effort would target specific states where they believe Republicans will feel political heat for opposing hearings once Obama has a living, breathing nominee to promote.
Republicans prepared Monday to unleash a torrent of activity opposing President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Congressional Republicans, many of them supposed “strict Constitutionalists”, want to stall for a year to deny President Obama the chance to choose a justice.
Casey hosted a teleconference Tuesday with two other participants – Center for American Progress Action Fund President/CEO Neera Tanden and Attorney Jon Pushinsky, a constitutional and civil rights lawyer from Pennsylvania.
Others in the administration, including Vice President Joe Biden, have pushed for a nominee that’s previously enjoyed Republican support. An announcement could come from Obama this week. “The politicization of the current vacancy and the President’s duty to nominate a Supreme Court justice violates the very principles of order and rule of law that uphold our Constitution and values as a nation”. He was confirmed 97-0 to the D.C. Circuit in 2013.
And Republicans are planning a coordinated effort to discredit Obama’s nominee, led by the party’s national committee.
The Senate confirmed Watford in a 61-34 vote in May 2012, two months after the chamber’s minority Republicans agreed to stop blocking some judicial nominees.
“My constituents back in Texas and, I think, people at large do not want this lame-duck president tilting the ideological balance of the Supreme Court for a generation”, said Senator John Cornyn. “The NAACP is keenly aware that upon Thurgood Marshall’s retirement, the president of the United States [Republican George H.W. Bush in 1990] had no problem nominating Clarence Thomas”.
Let a new President with a clear mandate, not a term-limited President with less than one year left in office who faced a historic rebuke by voters in the last midterm election, make this crucial decision. The most liberal Supreme Court by most measures was the Warren Court (1953-1969).
WASHINGTON (AP) – Conservative and liberal groups are only beginning their battle over the Supreme Court vacancy, with a smattering of television ads and behind-the-scenes research serving as warning shots in what’s sure to be an expensive fight that will color November’s elections.
Srinivasan, 49, and Garland, 63, serve together on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Advertisement
An immigrant hasn’t been appointed to the Supreme Court since President Franklin Roosevelt nominated the Austrian-born Felix Frankfurter in 1939. “And that’s the concern is that our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, our First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty, will be threatened”. They are operating based upon their bigotry towards and hatred of America’s first African-American President and mainstream American media is allowing them to get away with it (and so is Obama).
