President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
(35 minutes later)
President Obama on Wednesday nominated Merrick Garland to serve on the Supreme Court, setting up a protracted political fight with Republicans who have vowed to block any candidate picked by Obama in his final year in office.
President Obama on Wednesday nominated Merrick Garland to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, calculating that choosing the highly regarded jurist who has served presidents from both parties will ultimately force Senate Republicans to drop plans to block his nomination.
Garland, 63, is a longtime Washington lawyer and jurist who is chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Considered a moderate, Garland is widely respected in the D.C. legal community and was also a finalist for the first two Supreme Court vacancies Obama filled.
Garland, the 63-year-old chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a moderate, does not fit neatly into a category that is likely to mobilize Democratic voters in an election year. He is the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, not a “first” in the way an Asian American or black female nominee would have been.
[LIVE updates on Obama’s pick: Reactions from the GOP and more]
But in an act of political jiu-jitsu, Obama decided that it would be difficult to deny a respected legal figure who had won effusive bipartisan accolades the kind of hearing and vote that has taken place for decades.
In announcing his choice in the White House Rose Garden, Obama said he followed “a rigorous and comprehensive process” and that he reached out to members of both parties, legal associations and advocacy groups to gauge opinions from “across the spectrum.”
“I hope they’re fair,” the president said of Senate Republicans during his Rose Garden announcement, with a bit of a Midwestern twang in his voice. “That’s all. I hope they are fair.”
He said Garland “is widely recognized not only as one of America’s sharpest legal minds, but someone who brings to his work a spirit of decency, modesty, integrity, even-handedness and excellence.”
And while Obama was composed, and even a bit defiant in his remarks, it was Garland’s visible emotion that seemed to raise the stakes for Republicans in what will surely be a protracted political fight his final year in office. The former federal prosecutor choked up as he thanked the president for giving him “greatest honor of my life,” aside from when his wife of nearly three decades agreed to marry him, and kvelled about how his mother was watching him that very moment on television, “crying her eyes out.” His father, he added with regret, was not alive to witness it.
With Garland standing by his side, Obama said choosing a replacement for the late justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly last month, is “not a responsibility that I take lightly.”
In private conversations with aides and outside allies in recent days, the president emphasized that while he might have disappointed some liberals hoping that he opt for one of the two other finalists — Sri Srinivasan, a 49-year-old Indian American who also sits on the D.C. Circuit, or Paul Watford, a 48-year-old judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — he picked someone with whom he had a personal affinity and whose record was, in Obama’s words, “unassailable.”
“I said I would take this process seriously, and I did,” the president said. “I chose a serious man and an exemplary judge.”
“Because he actually wants to get his nominee confirmed,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.
“To find someone with such a long career in public service, marked by complex and sensitive issues, to find someone who just about everyone not only respects but genuinely likes, that is rare,” Obama said. “And it speaks to who Merrick Garland is, not just as lawyer but as a man.”
[Meet Merrick Garland: Here’s his story]
[Meet Merrick Garland: Here’s his story]
Despite “a political season that is even noisier and more volatile than usual,” Obama urged the Senate to take up the nomination, saying that lawmakers should treat the process “with the seriousness and care it deserves.”
After the announcement, Senate Republican leaders reiterated that they did not intend to vote on the nomination because they believe the next president has the right to fill the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last month. But they refrained from attacking Garland directly: Half a dozen said they would meet with him, and a couple said they would consider holding a vote during a lame-duck session, especially if a Democrat won the White House yet again.
After Obama introduced him, Garland promptly became emotional as he thanked the president. “This is the greatest honor of my life,” Garland said, “other than Lynn agreeing to marry me 28 years ago.”
Garland, who was appointed to the D.C. federal appeals court by President Bill Clinton in April 1997, was confirmed on a 76-to-23 vote and became chief judge three years ago. Seven sitting Republican senators voted to confirm Garland to the federal bench in 1997: Daniel Coats (Ind.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), James M. Inhofe (Okla.), John McCain (Ariz.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.).
He added that “a life of public service is as much a gift to the person who serves as it is to those he is serving. And for me, there can be no higher public service than serving as a member of the United States Supreme Court.”
Senators of both parties settled in Wednesday for what all expect to be an extended political siege. Democrats will seek to pressure vulnerable Republican incumbents amid tough reelection campaigns — and by extension, GOP leaders who are hoping to preserve their Senate majority — into abandoning the blockade.
Saying that it was “a great privilege to be nominated by a fellow Chicagoan” Garland stressed his “fidelity to the Constitution and the law.” If confirmed by the Senate, “I promise to continue on that course,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), taking the Senate floor after the nomination was announced, vowed to continue blocking its consideration.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reiterated Wednesday that the GOP-controlled Senate would refuse to consider Garland’s nomination, asserting in a series of tweets that Obama made the nomination “to politicize it for the purposes of the election.”
“It seems clear that President Obama made this nomination, not with the intent of seeing the nominee confirmed, but in order to politicize it for purposes of the election,” he said. “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say — their say — on this issue. So let’s give them a voice.”
A spokesman for McConnell said the majority leader spoke with Garland on the phone and explained to the nominee his stance on waiting for the next president’s pick.
Later in the day, McConnell spoke by phone with Garland and, according to his spokesman, “wished Judge Garland well” but made clear he would not meet with him.
“Since the Senate will not be acting on this nomination, he would not be holding a perfunctory meeting, but he wished Judge Garland well,” said the spokesman in a statement.
But several other GOP senators, including several who are up for reelection, said they would meet with Garland. “I meet with people, that’s what I do,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a Judiciary Committee member, adding at one point, “If the election doesn’t go the way Republicans want it, there will be a lot of people open to that I’m sure.”
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said he fully supports McConnell’s stand. “We should let the American people decide the direction of the court,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she would meet with Garland and “begin the process of evaluating this nomination.”
“Judge Garland is a capable and accomplished jurist,” said Collins in a statement. “The White House has requested that I meet with him, and I look forward to doing so, as has been my practice with all Supreme Court nominees.”
At least a couple of Republican senators acknowledged discussions of whether the GOP Senate might confirm an Obama nominee in a “lame duck” session after the election, should Hillary Clinton be elected president.
“If the election doesn’t go the way Republicans want it, there will be a lot of people open to that I’m sure,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Obama “has met his responsibility” under the Constitution and that now it is up to senators to meet theirs.
“Evaluating and confirming a Justice to sit on this nation’s highest court should not be an exercise in political brinkmanship and partisan posturing,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “It is a serious obligation, performed on behalf of the American people, to ensure a highly qualified candidate fills a vacancy on the Court. That obligation does not depend on the party affiliation of a sitting president, nor does the Constitution make an exception to that duty in an election year.”
Clinton hailed the choice of Garland, saying he has “a brilliant legal mind, and a long history of bipartisan support and admiration.” She called on the Senate to take up the nomination “immediately” and said refusing to do so would be “entirely unacceptable.”
If the Senate declines to take up Garland’s nomination before Obama leaves office, or votes it down, the next president will have the option of resurrecting the nomination or choosing someone else to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Either way, the process would begin anew with the next Congress.
White House officials, however, said they were not entertaining such a possibility. “We expect Chief Judge Garland to be confirmed in this Congress, period,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters in a telephone call Wednesday.
Seven sitting Republican senators voted to confirm Garland to the federal bench in 1997: Collins, Dan Coats (Ind.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), James M. Inhofe (Okla.), John McCain (Ariz.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.).
GOP lawmakers, though, have said since Scalia’s death that Obama should leave the choice of a new justice to his successor and that they have no intention of holding a hearing or a vote on the president’s pick.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a statement Wednesday in which he did not mention Garland by name, but said Republicans’ refusal to consider the president’s nomination was within the bounds of its “constitutional authority.”
“A majority of the Senate has decided to fulfill its constitutional role of advice and consent by withholding support for the nomination during a presidential election year, with millions of votes having been cast in highly charged contests,” he said.
Garland is a Chicago native who graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. After becoming a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, he joined the Justice Department, where he handled the drug investigation of then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District.
Ascending the ranks, Garland became principal associate deputy attorney general, where he supervised the massive investigations that led to the prosecutions of the Unabomber and the bombers of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Garland was appointed to the D.C. federal appeals court by President Bill Clinton in April 1997 and confirmed on a 76-to-23 vote. In February 2013, Garland became chief judge of the D.C. federal appeals court.
Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who worked with Garland at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, considers her former colleague “supremely qualified” for the high court.
Gorelick praised Garland’s role at the Justice Department in supervising the Unabomber and Oklahoma City investigations.
“We had a lot of very seasoned prosecutors, but when you have a matter that is both substantively difficult and cuts across the department, a really talented person such as Merrick will lead those,” said Gorelick. She added that Garland is a “brilliant lawyer and judge” who is known to be highly collegial even with colleagues across the ideological spectrum.
White House senior adviser Brian Deese, who is overseeing the nomination process, said that Garland’s ability to develop trust with different groups, as well as his “fundamental decency,” make him the perfect person for the court in such a divisive time.
“It’s the president’s assessment that he’s the best possible candidate for the circumstances we find ourselves in right now,” Deese said.
Initial reaction from interest groups supportive of the president was mixed. National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill praised Garland for “ a rigorous intellect, impeccable credentials, and a record of excellence.”
But she also said his record on women’s rights was “more or less a blank slate. Equally unfortunate is that we have to continue to wait for the first African American woman to be named. For this nomination, the so-called political experts ruled that the best choice for the highest court in the nation was a cipher — a real nowhere man.”
[The Fix: Republicans won’t confirm Garland]
A four-page document circulated Tuesday afternoon among a small group of the administration’s allies, with the heading, “Read What Republicans Had to Say About President Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee, Merrick Garland, Before He Was President Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee,” highlighted the support he has enjoyed from lawmakers in the past.
“Garland has had a distinguished legal career, and prior to the GOP’s historically unprecedented obstruction, was a favorite of Senate Republicans alongside progressives,” the briefing material says. “When earlier Supreme Court vacancies occurred in the seats now filled by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said he would be ‘very well supported by all sides’ as a SCOTUS nominee.”
The document notes that when Obama was filling the first Supreme Court vacancy of his tenure, Hatch was quoted at the time as saying that Garland would be a “consensus nominee” who “would be very well supported by all sides.” The briefing material includes previous descriptions of Garland by leading news organizations as a potential nominee who would attract support of Democrats and Republicans alike.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Garland’s colleague on the D.C. Circuit, once said that “anytime Judge Garland disagrees, you know you’re in a difficult area.”
Democrats are also preparing to make the Republicans’ opposition to filling the vacancy an issue in the fall election. Speaking in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday night, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said in her victory speech that one of the reasons the presidential race matters so much is because the Supreme Court appointment has such enormous policy implications.
“Together, we have to defend all of our rights — civil rights and voting rights, worker’s rights and women’s rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities — and that starts by standing with President Obama when he nominates a justice to the Supreme Court,” she said, prompting large cheers from the crowd.
[Brace yourself for a long battle about the future of the court]
[Brace yourself for a long battle about the future of the court]
Several Democrats said they did not believe that Republicans would be able to maintain their position over the long term, especially as Donald Trump continues his march toward the GOP presidential nomination. At the very least, several postulated, they would be forced to relent in a lame-duck session if a Democrat wins the presidency in November.
“Republicans are underestimating how awful it is going to be when they go back home for their recess,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “If you’re here in Washington for too long, you might be mistaken and misled into thinking this is a partisan issue. When they go back home, they’re going to get an earful.”
While Democratic-aligned activist groups had pushed for a more uniformly liberal nominee — and one who would make the court more diverse — virtually all Democratic senators who addressed Garland’s nomination said they were pleased by the choice.
“Nobody questions this man’s qualifications,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the top Judiciary Committee Democrat.
Ed Whelan, a former Republican aide to the Senate Judiciary Committee who is now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is advising conservative groups opposed to the Obama nomination, agreed.
“The White House is trying to figure out the person who would be most likely to crack the Republican line this year,” he said. “Most justices are able to time their departure from the court that someone of similar ilk replaces them. My guess is the White House decided that rolling the dice, that they had the best chance of the getting action on the Garland confirmation.”
By Wednesday evening, there were few cracks in the GOP wall.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) did not mention Garland by name in a lengthy statement, instead defending the Senate’s right under the Constitution to withhold its consent. “The American people shouldn’t be denied a voice,” he said.
After making his formal announcement, Obama met with the leaders of 23 progressive advocacy groups representing issues including labor, civil rights, abortion rights and the environment while Garland began to make calls to Capitol Hill. Participants in the meeting with the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly, said Obama emphasized he did not pick a nominee with an eye to pleasing a specific political constituency but believed many Americans would see the inherent unfairness in Republicans denying Garland due consideration.
Despite “a political season that is even noisier and more volatile than usual,” Obama said lawmakers should treat the process “with the seriousness and care it deserves.”
“I chose a serious man and an exemplary judge,” he said.
While the question of who sits on the nation’s highest court is not traditionally a top-tier election issue, Democrats are hoping to use it as part of a broader narrative about Republican resistance to the president’s policies.
While the question of who sits on the nation’s highest court is not traditionally a top-tier election issue, Democrats are hoping to use it as part of a broader narrative about Republican resistance to the president’s policies.
Both Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, and her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, called on the Senate to vote on Obama’s nominee. Clinton hailed Garland as having “a brilliant legal mind and a long history of bipartisan support and admiration” and said refusing to consider Obama’s nomination would be “entirely unacceptable.”
If the Senate declines to take up Garland’s nomination before Obama leaves office, or votes it down, the next president will have the option of resurrecting the nomination or choosing someone else to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Either way, the process would begin anew with the next Congress.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, noted that Richard Nixon first elevated the Supreme Court as an electoral issue in 1968, when he attacked then-Chief Justice Earl Warren and his fellow justices.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, noted that Richard Nixon first elevated the Supreme Court as an electoral issue in 1968, when he attacked then-Chief Justice Earl Warren and his fellow justices.
“It was putting a liberal-dominated court at the center of the liberal establishment he was attacking,” Greenberg said, for “bringing about all these cultural changes” in the country.
“It was putting a liberal-dominated court at the center of the liberal establishment he was attacking,” Greenberg said, for “bringing about all these cultural changes” in the country.
At the moment, more Americans appear to be sympathetic to the White House’s argument. Sixty-three percent of Americans said the Senate should hold hearings on Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, while 32 percent said it should not hold hearings and leave it to the next president, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week. Majorities of Democrats and independents supported holding hearings, while Republicans were more evenly split (46-49) and over half of conservative Republicans said hearings should not be held (54 percent).
At the moment, more Americans appear to be sympathetic to the White House’s argument. Sixty-three percent of Americans said the Senate should hold hearings on Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, while 32 percent said it should not hold hearings and leave it to the next president, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week.
Administration officials are hopeful that the GOP senators who are most vulnerable this November — Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mark Kirk (Ill.) and Pat Toomey (Penn.) — may lobby their leaders for a vote if they come under fire back home for blocking the nominee.
Administration officials are hopeful that the GOP senators who are most vulnerable this November — Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mark Kirk (Ill.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.) — may lobby their leaders for a vote if they come under fire back home for blocking the nominee.
“The success or failure of this will depend on the pressure that can be brought to bear on those senators who Mitch McConnell marched out to the firing line,” said one former senior administration official, who asked for anonymity in order to discuss internal White House deliberations.
With Garland standing by his side, Obama said he was struck by how he “never lost touch” with the victims and families of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing while supervising the investigation of the deadly attack at the Justice Department.
William Branigin, Mark Berman and Robert Barnes contributed to this report.
Garland said he always tried to “live up to” the trust that the community placed in him and his staff. “Trust that justice will be done in our courts without prejudice and partisanship is what, in large part, distinguishes this country from others,” he said.
William Branigin, Mark Berman, Jerry Markon, Anne Gearan and Robert Barnes contributed to this report.
