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Friday, July 01, 2005

Brief Supreme Court musings

It seems to me that any potential nominee for Associate Justice whose thinking is sufficiently documented to satisfy the political right that s/he won't become another Blackmun, Stevens, Souter or Kennedy might not be confirmable. For example, anyone with an ascertainable predilection to overturn Roe v. Wade could be a non-starter because most Americans (around 60%) don't want that and it's a galvanizing issue. The current President can't ignore the considerations that led his recent Republican predecessors to nominate ciphers like Kennedy and Souter. There's ample reason to doubt that a latter-day Bork would make it through.

I'd look for Bush to choose a cipher he knows personally, someone his gut tells him won't be another Kennedy or Souter. He has already shown a strong tendency to elevate people he knows well, most prominently Alberto Gonzales to Attorney General and Condoleezza Rice to Secretary of State.

Gonzales is the obvious choice. Even though a Gonzales nomination will disappoint many on the right (where he's seen as "soft" on abortion, mostly), I'll be surprised if he doesn't get the nod. Bush obviously thinks his heart is in the right place, and I expect he would be fairly easy to confirm. The torture memos didn't keep him from becoming our top law-enforcer, and I think the torture angle on Gonzalez is pretty well played out. Maybe there will be a few changed votes because this is a life-tenured position, but not many. The "first Latino justice" thing will only help. (I was amused recently to see a few publications refer to the "second Latino/Hispanic justice," noting that Benjamin Cardozo was of Portuguese-Jewish heritage. That doesn't make him Latino or Hispanic unless his ancestors lived in Latin America at some point.)


posted at 9:08 PM

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