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U.S. Constitution Title: Obama Shuns the Left as White House Mulls U.S. High Court Slot April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Justice John Paul Stevens’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court may remind progressive legal groups that reshaping the judiciary ranks low on President Barack Obama’s priority list. As Obama considers his choice for a successor, such groups as the Alliance for Justice and the American Constitution Society, which back broad protection of individual rights, likely will wield far less influence than their conservative counterparts did under President George W. Bush. The leading prospects -- U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and federal appellate judges Merrick Garland and Diane Wood -- are relative moderates. Kagan has backed strong presidential authority over national security; rulings by Garland and Wood suggest they would expand rights only gradually. “The candidates who are truly liberals aren’t really on the table,” said Tom Goldstein, a Washington appellate lawyer whose Scotusblog Web site tracks the court. “You can just tell that it’s not where the White House is headed, and the groups themselves seemingly accept it.” Liberals say they want someone who will do more than support abortion and gay rights. They are seeking a justice to challenge the “originalism” of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who say the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the meaning of its words when they were adopted. “Conservatives have framed the constitutional debate in their terms,” said William Marshall, a University of North Carolina law professor who sits on the American Constitution Society’s board. “We need people on the court who will be able to respond to that.” Favored Candidates Favorite candidates of liberal groups include Stanford Law School Professors Pam Karlan and Kathleen Sullivan and University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone. None was among the nine candidates the White House considered for the seat fillSotomayor. Conservatives had similar wish lists when Bush filled two vacancies. The difference is that Bush leaned on a group of outside advisers, including former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. Two of the four lawyers Leo recommended -- John Roberts and Samuel Alito -- wound up on the court. “Groups on the left don’t have that kind of standing with the Obama administration,” Goldstein said. Of the leading prospects to succeed Stevens, Wood, 59, has done the most to offer a theory of constitutional interpretation. In a 2005 law review article, she criticized originalism, saying the Constitution should be interpreted flexibly to reflect “the norms Americans have adopted.” Constitutional Interpretation At the same time, Wood said of the Constitution: “There is no reason to suppose that it will move systematically in either a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ed last year by Sonia direction.” Kagan, 49, Obama’s top Supreme Court advocate, has adopted much of the Bush administration’s approach toward national security, putting her at odds with civil libertarians. In a 2001 law review article she argued for stronger presidential control over administrative agencies, a position in line with conservative calls for a “unitary executive.” Garland, 57, may be the most conservative of the three, particularly on criminal issues. Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, which opposed Sotomayor’s appointment, said his group likely would devote “little or no money” toward attacking Garland. “It is likely that Justice Stevens will be replaced by someone who is not as liberal as he is,” said Pamela Harris, a former Stevens law clerk and the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. “That is just the realities of the politics of the confirmation process.” Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Jeff Sessions of Alabama, yesterday said they wouldn’t try to block a vote on a mainstream nominee. Judges as Umpires Obama has largely eschewed ideologically focused judges. At her confirmation hearing last year, Sotomayor said the judicial role is limited. She accepted Roberts’s characterization of judges as neutral umpires and distanced herself from Obama’s statement that “empathy” should guide jurists. “The task of the judge is not to make law,” Sotomayor said. “It is to apply the law.” Obama’s lower court nominees similarly have tended toward the noncontroversial. An exception is Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley whom Obama nominated to the federal appeals court in San Francisco. “One could say that Liu and a couple of district court nominees are the only real leftists,” Levey said. Liberal Letter In February, 11 leading liberal academics wrote Obama urging him to act “with far more energy and dispatch in the vitally important task of nominating and confirming federal judges.” The group, which includes Stone and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, said Obama has “an historic opportunity to reestablish our nation’s commitment to the core values of our Constitution.” Stone, who as the dean at Chicago hired Obama to teach there, said he doubts the president will choose a justice liberal enough to be an ideological counterweight to Roberts and Alito. “I think he’s not inclined to fight that fight,” Stone said. Obama “will likely want to appoint someone who ultimately will not be regarded as that controversial.”
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#1. To: war (#0)
That isn't going to work. Anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh will cause a firestorm.
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