Nomination of 63-year-old progressive federal appeals court judge a surprise as his long record arms intransigent Senate Republicans with ammunition
Barack Obama is expected to intensify his fight with the Republican majority in the US Senate by nominating an appeals court judge with a record of challenging the federal government to the US supreme court in the wake of the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.
Merrick Garland, the nominee according to a White House official, now faces an almost insurmountable task of overcoming the dogged resistance of the Republican wing of the Senate that has made clear its intention to boycott any Obama nominee to the nation’s highest court. His nomination puts him at the center of one of the most bitter disputes to erupt between the White House and conservatives in Congress.
At 63, Garland was the oldest of the candidates that Obama shortlisted for the top judicial post. He has more federal judicial experience than any other supreme court nominee in history, according to the White House. His age alone is likely to embolden Republican senators in their contentious opposition to confirming anyone, as it will arm them with ammunition against him based on his long record.
The nominee is chief judge of the federal appeals court of Washington DC, a panel that traditionally is seen as a training ground for future supreme court justices. He was nominated for the DC circuit by Bill Clinton in 1997.
It may not presage well that it took the US Senate of that day – which was also Republican controlled – 18 months to complete the confirmation process. The eventual vote was 76 to 23, with 32 Republicans supporting him.
This is the third time that Obama has considered Garland for a supreme court position: he was a runner-up in the process that led to the appointments of both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in 2009 and 2010 respectively. In the course of the 2010 deliberations, Orrin Hatch of Utah, the longest-serving member of theUS Senate, called Garland “a consensus nominee” – a fact that Obama might now use as counter-ammunition.
The White House has pointed to a number of other highly conservative champions of Garland, including US supreme court chief justice John Roberts, Garland’s former colleague on the DC circuit who once said “anytime Judge Garland disagrees, you know you’re in a difficult area”.
A native Chicagoan and Harvard graduate, Garland excelled in private law but chose to eschew fat salaries for the less lucrative but arguably more exciting world of public criminal prosecutions. In the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that ripped apart a federal building and killed 168 people, he was dispatched to the city to set up the early stages of the prosecution case, winning plaudits for marshaling massive amounts of evidence that led to the convictions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
He was also central to the prosecution of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
He acquired his passion for being a judge by sitting at the feet of the liberal supreme court justice William Brennan, who was a champion of progressive policies such as opposition to the death penalty and support of abortion rights. Garland has had plenty of opportunity to wield similar progressive influence as chief judge of the DC appeals circuit which, given its location, frequently acts as arbiter in major cases concerning the federal government.
Among those were the 2008 judgment from the appeals court, led by Garland, that punched a hole in the Bush administration’s detention of so-called “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo without any oversight from the civilian courts. The ruling ordered the US government to submit the cases of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs to civilian judicial review.
Barack Obama is expected to intensify his fight with the Republican majority in the US Senate by nominating an appeals court judge with a record of challenging the federal government to the US supreme court in the wake of the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.
Merrick Garland, the nominee according to a White House official, now faces an almost insurmountable task of overcoming the dogged resistance of the Republican wing of the Senate that has made clear its intention to boycott any Obama nominee to the nation’s highest court. His nomination puts him at the center of one of the most bitter disputes to erupt between the White House and conservatives in Congress.
At 63, Garland was the oldest of the candidates that Obama shortlisted for the top judicial post. He has more federal judicial experience than any other supreme court nominee in history, according to the White House. His age alone is likely to embolden Republican senators in their contentious opposition to confirming anyone, as it will arm them with ammunition against him based on his long record.
The nominee is chief judge of the federal appeals court of Washington DC, a panel that traditionally is seen as a training ground for future supreme court justices. He was nominated for the DC circuit by Bill Clinton in 1997.
It may not presage well that it took the US Senate of that day – which was also Republican controlled – 18 months to complete the confirmation process. The eventual vote was 76 to 23, with 32 Republicans supporting him.
This is the third time that Obama has considered Garland for a supreme court position: he was a runner-up in the process that led to the appointments of both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in 2009 and 2010 respectively. In the course of the 2010 deliberations, Orrin Hatch of Utah, the longest-serving member of theUS Senate, called Garland “a consensus nominee” – a fact that Obama might now use as counter-ammunition.
The White House has pointed to a number of other highly conservative champions of Garland, including US supreme court chief justice John Roberts, Garland’s former colleague on the DC circuit who once said “anytime Judge Garland disagrees, you know you’re in a difficult area”.
A native Chicagoan and Harvard graduate, Garland excelled in private law but chose to eschew fat salaries for the less lucrative but arguably more exciting world of public criminal prosecutions. In the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that ripped apart a federal building and killed 168 people, he was dispatched to the city to set up the early stages of the prosecution case, winning plaudits for marshaling massive amounts of evidence that led to the convictions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
He was also central to the prosecution of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
He acquired his passion for being a judge by sitting at the feet of the liberal supreme court justice William Brennan, who was a champion of progressive policies such as opposition to the death penalty and support of abortion rights. Garland has had plenty of opportunity to wield similar progressive influence as chief judge of the DC appeals circuit which, given its location, frequently acts as arbiter in major cases concerning the federal government.
Among those were the 2008 judgment from the appeals court, led by Garland, that punched a hole in the Bush administration’s detention of so-called “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo without any oversight from the civilian courts. The ruling ordered the US government to submit the cases of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs to civilian judicial review.
