Thread: Srinivasan or Garland likely Obama choice for U.S. Supreme Court: source

Topic - The President.

Tue Mar 15, 2016

Srinivasan or Garland likely Obama choice for U.S. Supreme Court: source

WASHINGTON | BY JULIA EDWARDS AND JOAN BISKUPIC

President Barack Obama is likely to announce either Judge Sri Srinivasan or Judge Merrick Garland as his pick for U.S. Supreme Court nominee and the announcement could come as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the selection process said.

The team of advisers helping to vet candidates, line up their public supporters and answer the president's questions had finished its work, the source said on Tuesday.

Obama is searching for a replacement for long-serving conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on Feb. 13. With Scalia's death, the court is divided 4-4 between conservatives and liberals. Obama's nominee could move the court to the left for the first time in decades.

Republicans, who control the U.S. Senate, have vowed not to hold confirmation hearings or an up-or-down vote on any nominee picked by the Democratic president for the lifetime position on the court. Senate confirmation is required for any nominee to join the bench.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested there might be no point even in holding the traditional "courtesy call" meetings with whomever Obama nominates, infuriating Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats.
Republicans, hoping a candidate from their party wins the Nov. 8 presidential election, want the next president, who takes office in January, to make the selection. Billionaire Donald Trump is the leading Republican presidential candidate; Obama's former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is the front-runner on the Democratic side.

Without Scalia, the Supreme Court is evenly split with four liberals and four conservatives. An Obama appointment could tilt the court to the left for the first time in decades.

Both Srinivasan and Garland are seen as having unique attributes that could weigh heavily in Obama's decision.
Srinivasan, 49, and Garland, 63, serve together on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That appeals court has served as a springboard to the Supreme Court for several justices including Scalia in recent decades.
Srinivasan, who was born in India and grew up in Kansas, would be the first Asian-American and first Hindu on the high court. Obama appointed him to the appeals court in 2013. The Senate confirmed him in a 97-0 vote.

DIVERSITY AN ISSUE

He could appeal to the president's long-declared interest in bringing more diversity to the bench.

Srinivasan has served in the Justice Department under Democratic and Republican presidents and worked as a clerk to the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican appointee.

Garland, who has earned praise from lawmakers of both parties, is the chief judge of the Washington appeals court, where he has served since being appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1997, winning confirmation in a 76-23 vote. Prior to that, he served in the Justice Department under Clinton.

With Senate Republicans vowing to turn their backs on anyone he picks to fill the vacancy, Obama may be looking for a nominee who could convince the Republicans to change course. Garland could fit that bill with moderate record, background as a prosecutor and a history of drawing Republican support.

Garland was under consideration in 2009 for Obama's first appointment but the new administration chose Sonia Sotomayor, attracted to her rise from a Bronx housing project to the elite corridors of Yale and the federal judiciary.

Yet they also regarded Garland as a future compromise choice if another vacancy opened in an election year with the Senate under Republican control, according to Obama advisers at the time and others weighing in on the current nomination.

That is the situation now confronting Obama.

Presidents tend to pick nominees younger than Garland, so they can serve for decades and extend a president's legacy. But Obama may reason that the choice of an older nominee might also entice Senate Republicans into considering Obama's selection.

Obama already has named two justices to the Supreme Court: Sotomayor, who at 55 became the first Hispanic justice in 2009, and Elena Kagan, who was 50 when she became the fourth woman to ever serve on the court in 2010.

Last week, a source familiar with the selection process said the White House had narrowed the selection to three candidates: Srinivasan, Garland and Paul Watford, 48, a judge on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Watford is an African-American and the U.S. Supreme Court has had only two black justices in its history.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUSKCN0WI03D

Supreme Court Nominee Merrick Garland: Tough on Crime, but Soft on Guns?

by Ronn Blitzer | 9:03 am,
March 16th, 2016



Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has quite the resume. Clerkships with high courts, partnership at a top firm, and federal prosecution are all part of the background of the man who could take the late Antonin Scalia’s place. He is an established centrist on the bench, with a tough stance on crime that could, in theory, make him palatable to a Republican Senate who has vowed not to confirm any nominee until the next President takes office. However, there is one area in particular that conservatives will scrutinize.

Garland, currently the Chief Judge of the Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals, is viewed by some to be left-leaning on gun control. In a 2007 case, he voted to review a restrictive gun law that had previously been shot down. The law included a requirement for guns to be kept unloaded and disassembled, unless they were being kept at a place of business or were being used for legal recreational activities. Prohibiting people from having functioning guns for defense in their home was a critical issue. A U.S. District Court had ruled against the ban (and for the gun owner). The D.C. Circuit upheld that ruling, but Garland then voted, as part of a request to the court as a whole, for the D.C. Circuit to reconsider their own ruling, otherwise known as a request for en banc review. Garland lost, and the previous decision was upheld. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled the ban unconstitutional. While Garland’s actual decision was only to review the law and not to enforce it outright, the fact that he didn’t just agree to kill the ban may not sit well with conservatives.

Even more concerning for gun lovers is Garland’s 2000 decision in NRA v. Reno. In that case, the National Rifle Association fought against retention of background check information that is collected when people legally purchase guns. The NRA argued that the information was required to be immediately destroyed under the Brady Act. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno’s position was that it was necessary and allowed under the act to retain the data for six months in order to audit the background check system. Garland ruled in Reno’s favor, stating that her interpretation of the Brady Act was reasonable.

These two instances are hardly defining in the grand scheme of things. Voting to review a gun ban is not the same as support for it. Likewise, upholding temporary retention of background information for the purpose of making sure the system works in no way restricts a person’s right to bear arms. But when Senate Republicans are already saying they will refuse any nominee, it would be surprising if they didn’t point to these cases when they justify their decision, or lack thereof.

On the flip side, according to SCOTUSBlog, Garland has veered to the right on criminal law issues, which is not surprising for someone with his law enforcement credentials. He has ruled in favor of prosecutors when it comes to admitting evidence, and has voted against defendants, even when more conservative judges have taken the other side. A long record of being tough on crime could help sway some.

Garland also supervised a number of high-profile prosecutions, including the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bombing. The latter went a long way in getting him appointed to the D.C. Court of Appeals by President Clinton. Garland was popular with Republicans then, and of the 32 Republicans Senators who voted in his favor in 1997, seven are still in office.

Under other circumstances, Garland would seem like an ideal candidate who could appeal to both sides of the aisle. In 2010, he was a favorite to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, the spot that ended up going to Elena Kagan. Today, however, he enters hostile territory.

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/supr...-soft-on-guns/

The ‘Moderates’ Are Not So Moderate: Merrick Garland
by CARRIE SEVERINO March 11, 2016 8:21 PM

As the White House prepares to choose a nominee for the Supreme Court, they are continuing to suggest that they might nominate a supposed “moderate.”

But Garland has a long record, and, among other things, it leads to the conclusion that he would vote to reverse one of Justice Scalia’s most important opinions, D.C. vs. Heller, which affirmed that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Back in 2007, Judge Garland voted to undo a D.C. Circuit court decision striking down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The liberal District of Columbia government had passed a ban on individual handgun possession, which even prohibited guns kept in one’s own house for self-defense. A three-judge panel struck down the ban, but Judge Garland wanted to reconsider that ruling. He voted with Judge David Tatel, one of the most liberal judges on that court. As Dave Kopel observed at the time, the “[t]he Tatel and Garland votes were no surprise, since they had earlier signaled their strong hostility to gun owner rights” in a previous case. Had Garland and Tatel won that vote, there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had a chance to protect the individual right to bear arms for several more years.

Moreover, in the case mentioned earlier, Garland voted with Tatel to uphold an illegal Clinton-era regulation that created an improvised gun registration requirement. Congress prohibited federal gun registration mandates back in 1968, but as Kopel explained, the Clinton Administration had been “retaining for six months the records of lawful gun buyers from the National Instant Check System.” By storing these records, the federal government was creating an informal gun registry that violated the 1968 law. Worse still, the Clinton program even violated the 1994 law that had created the NICS system in the first place. Congress directly forbade the government from retaining background check records for law abiding citizens.

Garland thought all of these regulations were legal, which tells us two things. First, it tells us that he has a very liberal view of gun rights, since he apparently wanted to undo a key court victory protecting them. Second, it tells us that he’s willing to uphold executive actions that violate the rights of gun owners. That’s not so moderate, is it?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-...errick-garland