I’m seeing lots of rumors that Obama has made his choice for Scalia’s replacement (but no good confirmation), and that he’ll make the formal announcement on Thursday. Her name is Staci Michelle Yandle, and she is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.
For some reason, the rumor sites are all emphasizing the fact that she is a black lesbian woman, rather than the real shocker, that Obama isn’t installing another far right wackaloon in the slot.
I don’t know that I trust this rumor, but if true, it would show that Obama is completely out of fucks, which would be awesome.
Sorry to confuse you all — there is no good evidence for any specific choice anywhere. I’m just amused at the headlines that all babble about “black lesbian woman”, and you know that when Obama does deliver a choice, unless it’s a “white heterosexual man”, the headlines will all be entirely about the person’s color, sexual orientation, and gender.
Doesn’t that article state “Yandle, who’s in private practice, will be Obama’s pick for the district court for the Southern District of his home state of Illinois” rather than the Supreme Court? Am I missing something?
That article was from 2014, presumably PZ has seen other information about her being a pick for SC. I can’t find it with a google search, though. Care to share a link, PZ?
That article is from 2014, and is talking about being appointed as a federal judge, not a SCOTUS Justice.
Nah, I’m just seeing rumors on facebook. I don’t trust them. What I found bizarre was all the posts gushing over the fact that she’s a black lesbian woman, rather than her skill set.
That seems really, really unlikely. I don’t know if it would be unprecedented to appoint a District Court Judge, but I would expect a nomination from one of the Courts of Appeals – probably the DC Circuit. I’ve also heard Loretta Lynch’s name being floated.
The linked article is two years old, so presumably Ms. Yandle has been out of private practice and serving on the district court for much of that time.
Sometimes who you are is part of your qualifications. A black, lesbian woman will probably know a helluva lot more about discrimination than a white middle-aged heterosexual.
Not that it’s likely, but I kind of like Charles Pierce’s suggestion that Obama just embrace the GOP insanity and nominate Anita Hill (who is a respected legal scholar and actually quite qualified).
Nominating Anita Hill would give the republicans an actual valid reason for rejecting her on the basis that her history with Justice Thomas might make a respectful relationship among the court members impossible.
A black or LBGTQ (or both) member on the Court would be great, but only if they’re also eminently qualified for the job.
Gee, the name I’ve seen the most bandied about is Padmanabhan Srikanth Srinivasan, a brown heterosexual white man (Well, he did go to Stanford [undergrad], Stanford [law school], Stanford [business school], and lectures at Hahvahd. That’s all pretty white.).
qwints @5,
I’m not sure offhand if anyone has gone directly from federal district court to SCOTUS. O’Connor was an intermediate appellate judge in Arizona when she was nominated, and of course plenty of people have been nominated without ever having been judges at all (e.g. Kagan, Powell, Rehnquist).
I agree with you that Lynch or a recent Court of Appeal appointee are the most likely candidates. Aside from the usual credentials in terms of qualifications, this nomination will require (1) someone who the administration is reasonable confident will not have any personal disqualifying issues; and (2) someone who can afford to be in limbo for the next year, unsure whether they’ll get the position or not.
(1) argues for someone who’s recently survived a Senate confirmation hearing (like Lynch, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, or Judges like Sri Srinavasian or Jane whatshername from the 8th Circuit), and against anyone else.
(2) argues for someone who’s currently got a government job anyway and doesn’t have any particular political ambitions. Court of Appeal judges can just continue working as normal (though any controversial cases will be watched carefully), but someone like Kamala Harris (California AG, who plans to run for the Senate) is probably out.
I’d be shocked if Obama nominated anyone who could be seen as politically controversial, like Eric Holder or Anita Hill. Or Elizabeth Warren, which is a name I see on some people’s wish lists.
First of all, “lesbian woman” seems redundant. And unless she’s a black latina lesbian, it’s still too exclusive.
re #10:
white if you don’t actually look at his heritage of American/Asian-Indian. Apparently he has previously been fully confirmed to federal judgeship, even by a Rethuglican cabal. So to deny him to become a Supreme Justice would be hypocrisy too obvious for the Rethugs to deny.
.
— With his [Sri’s] Asian-American and Indian-American background
more at link
But is she a Catholic? That seems to be the main qualifier these days.
Since Republicans are threatening to block any Obama nominees, the correct strategy is to nominate someone who is eminently qualified, so that Republicans will have a hard time justifying their obstruction to voters. Unfortunately, that means a moderate rather than a liberal nominee.
On the bright side, after Republicans reject Obama’s nominee, they’ll be forced to accept one of the liberal judges are nominated by President Sanders or Clinton.
@12
There are non-binary lesbians, and while I don’t think they were a concern in mind when they said “lesbian woman”, that is a thing that exists.
Why can’t you be both liberal and qualified? I can understand conservatives not wanting a liberal (and vice versa), but qualified in this context is a technical issue, not a socialisation issue.
Again why? The last two terms the Republicans have demonstrated a never ending ability to refuse to do their jobs and jump the shark while blindfolded and using a pogo stick. What makes you think they’ll suddenly be ‘forced’ to do their jobs with a new President?
Of course. Because white hetero cis-male is the default human being, and anyone else chosen for anything ever must be done for the sake of *turns on reverb effect* POLITICAL-AL-AL-al-al CORRECTNESS-ESS-ESS-ess-ess!!!
On the bright side, after Republicans reject Obama’s nominee, they’ll be forced to accept one of the liberal judges are nominated by President Sanders or Clinton.
That very realistic possibility is why I think they’re likely to cave. Or at least why the establishment Repubs will want to cave (the Teabaggers will never cave). There’s a case to be made that they’ll want to at least hold out till the elections and then if Clinton or Sanders wins push one through in the lame duck period. But obstructing on this also has a chance to negatively impact their Senate holdings. I figure at the very least they’ll hold out long enough to test the waters. If the negative PR gets too heavy, they may capitulate rather than risk losing the Senate. Losing on Senate and Presidency after holding out on filling the seat would put them in a terrible place. If the Dems take the Senate while holding the White House, Ginsburg will likely retire so the Dems can replace her well. And then the pressure is on Kennedy to keep a pulse until the Dems are out. The Repubs stand to lose a lot if the chips fall bad, and they may end up deciding that a SCOTUS seat fight now isn’t worth the long term risks.
block quote fail on one of the quotes there…
@Rob,
There are 54 Republican senators, so he needs the approval of 14 Republicans to pass filibuster. Republicans will assuredly be more aggressive and monolithic in attacking the qualifications of a liberal judge than those of a moderate judge.
If Republicans continued to hold the Senate for the entirety of a Sanders or Clinton presidency, they could hypothetically block Supreme court nominees indefinitely. But it would look really bad for them. One can only hope the Republicans would shoot themselves in the foot like that. In any case, the current 8-judge supreme court is already much more liberal than the one with Scalia in it. Usually the court is controlled by the median justice, and now the median is somewhere between Kennedy and… Breyer?
The risk this time is the Senate. Sure if Hill/Sand gets elected they could still obstruct, but not if they lose the Senate. If they try to filibuster they risk the Dems going nuclear option and killing the filibuster rules entirely. If they refuse to play even with moderate nominees, they risk a Dem Senate yanking the rug out from under them and putting a real diehard liberal in (two or even three if Ginsburg/Kennedy retire or choke).
“Obama will nominate a competent legal scholar to the Supreme Court.”
When he was appointed, Scalia was considered a competent legal scholar.
http://www.theonion.com/article/obama-compiles-shortlist-gay-transsexual-abortion–52361 ^_^
God dammit I love The Onion. That’s fantastic.
@8 + @9
As I said in the “This could change everything” post two days before Charles Pierce’s article @69:
While that joke was in incredibly poor taste, I wasn’t just pulling things out of the air. Hill is a constitutional law expert. Her service on government cases for the EEOC is what brought her into conflict with Justice Thomas in the first place. She won the 2008 Louis P and Evelyn Smith first amendment award. She does have her bonafides. In terms of precedent, in 2010 Obama nominated Scott Matheson, Jr. to the 10th Circuit. (He was my constitutional law and evidence professor, which is why I remember this). Matheson also had worked for the federal government, (as a US Attorney), but like Anita Hill had no judiciary experience. He also replaced famed conservative judge Michael W. McConnell, who was once seen as the frontrunner to replace Rehnquist. I mean: Jay, Marshall, Rehnquist, Powell, Brandeis, Sutherland, Stone and Warren all had no judicial experience prior to their appointments to the supreme court. We’re still citing opinions written by these justices and chief justices as good law.
By comparison. Yandle is not as strong a candidate. She hasn’t written as extensively as Hill, and she had a very rough confirmation vote, which even provoked significant opposition to granting cloture to even have that vote. That’s going to be an almost DOA nomination if Obama makes it. Dems would need to retake control of the Senate to get her through again.
That said, I’d still be banking that white house staffers are making a case for, (and way more importantly to), Richard Posner. He’s been called “the 10th justice” for a reason. He would give establishment GOP some things they want on the court, and since he’s 77, there’s a huge likelihood that the next GOP president would get to replace him anyway if he turns out to be another Souter. If you want to keep defending abortion rights and LGBT rights, he’s the safest possible gamble for the president.
Years ago, when liberal were complaining about a Bush the First or Reagan court nomination, some Rethuglican (probably George Will) said something like: the president can nominate anyone he likes, and as long as he is qualified his ideology is irrelevant. The solution to the problem of not liking the president’s pick is to elect a Democratic president.
Of course, at the time, Reps had a lock on the WH, and Dems on Congress. Now that the situation is reversed, look how they insist on new rules once again. Calvinball anyone?
I would love it if the president were to nominate a black lesbian. If for no other reason than just to hear the sound of ~300 livid Donald Ducks simultaneously pitching a fit. The blast would blow the lid off the Capitol dome fer sure. Maybe even pop ol’ Rush Limpbag’s skull. But the best reason to do it is simple: how else would we get her on the bench?
eggmoidal @26:
Unfortunately, Obama is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy as well, at least if he expects his nominees to be confirmed. As a Senator, he voted against the confirmation of both Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito, and he made it clear that he was doing so based on ideology and not qualifications.
The Republicans are currently proposing to take things further than Obama did, of course, by denying his nominee even a hearing, much less a vote. But if all the current senators applied Obama’s own philosophy — that a senators are entitled to vote against nominees they find qualified but ideologically unacceptable — then it would be pretty hard for him to get anyone confirmed.
rabbitbrush (#10) –
Gee, the name I’ve seen the most bandied about is Padmanabhan Srikanth Srinivasan,
The republican controlled senate gave Srinivasan a 97-0 vote of approval for his position on the appeals court. It would be hard for them now to try and block him.
Unfortunately, while he may one of those who struck down DOMA, he’s also pro-wall street and pro-TPP. That almost certainly means Obama will nominate him.
I don’t know though, look at how long the GOP was willing to drag it’s feet on Restrepo. Six months from the 2nd nomination, (first one was returned because senate adjourned without putting him on the calendar), for him to get a hearing in committee. Six more months for the full senate to vote on him. All told a 14 month process just to get to the 3rd Circuit. McConnell taking forever to get a job done is a familiar complaint.
I also note that Obama was never on the Judiciary Committee, so we’re looking at a speech he made as a ordinary senator. Kennedy, Schumer, Biden, Feinstein, and Durbin all voted against Roberts in committee. Obama’s consistent, he does the same thing to Alito, but these are not election years. He’s also only been there two years when he votes against Alito. Guy is taking Freshman Senator positions, is what I’m saying. You can make the same charge against Mike Lee or Ted Cruz, but they’re both clearly whackaloons, too. The other five senators I mentioned were the party die-hards. Durbin’s now the minority whip, and Schumer should be next majority/minority leader. If anything, I see Obama in those votes as trying to impress party leaders so he’ll get better committee positions later on. Then his presidential campaign succeeds beyond anyone’s predictions. So, looking at that, I’d expect the party standard bearers like McConnell and Cornyn to vote against, as well as tea partiers like Lee, Cruz and Rubio. Senators in non-battleground states, like Hatch (my state is very sorry), could go either way. If McConnell indicates a nominee isn’t terrible while still voting against them, and it doesn’t look like the GOP presidential nominee is likely to win by very much or at all, then these senators are more likely to choose to confirm.
It would be an interesting situation if Anita Hill was nominated. It would be an open invitation to revisit the fiasco of Clarence Thomas’ nomination and the issue of sexual harassment — a subject that deserves continuous revisitation. As Bill Cosby is going down now (wrong choice of words) so can Thomas. The threat of national humiliation might compel his resignation if not impeachment (unlikely with this Congress). Unfortunately I think this procedure which would be viewed as such deadly hardball that it would leave a bad taste across board, and would cast Ms. Hill as only being put forward to be a weapon to bring down Thomas. And it would tarnish Obama’s reputation. Still, if in the next several days Thomas was to resign, out of grief for a lost friend, yada yada, creating another vacancy, I would guess that he was told privately that if he didn’t Anita would go forward. Another vacancy would increase the pressure on the Republican senate to put someone in
F.O. @23, thanks for the reminder that the idea of someone like me being on the SCOTUS is no less an impossible joke than a cop killer. Really made my day, to have a transphobic joke dropped in without so much as a note to warn people.
@#15, Siggy
Here, everyone, is the Hillary Clinton mindset in a nutshell: anyone who is even slightly left must be totally unqualified, and someone who is “moderate” by inside-the-beltway-and-loudly-on-Fox-News, right-of-center standards is the only sort of candidate who can possibly be qualified, and citizen preferences be damned. Why can’t these people just go vote for the Republicans, like they obviously want to? If they’re really “saner” than the average Republican, it would spare us people like Trump and Cruz, and maybe then the Democratic Party could start actually doing something other than caving in to Republican demands one after another.
@#28, left0ver1under
Yup. He’s definitely on the shortlist. As I commented elsewhere:
I expected to be proved right, but it would be a little depressing if that’s actually the first nominee put forth.
It would only look really bad for them amongst people they don’t care about anyway. Amongst the True Believers, ridiculously obstinate pig-headedness in refusing any compromise whatsoever seems pretty much de rigueur these days.
Perhaps Obama is planning to use Goldilocks pricing to get a real progressive on the bench: Obama won’t nominate a conservative the Republicans want, he nominates a black lesbian that the Republicans will never support in a million years, so as a compromise, he offers Lincoln Chafee.
Okay, it looks now like Chuck Grassley just more or less lived up to my previous… not really theory, (in either sense of the word), maybe hunch, instinct, wild conjecture? Anyway, read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/us/politics/senator-charles-grassley-hearings-supreme-court-nominee.html
As I suggested, the political calculus has started to matter to republicans. It looks like a nominee would at least get a committee hearing. Grassley’s supposedly more autonomous than we usually think of committee chairs. (Although, what Mitch McConnell says about how he runs the senate and how he actually does run the senate are not always even close). So, the question is does Obama go big and risk McConnell sticking to his guns, or does Obama go with a safer bet that might let McConnell shift responsibility to Grassley if this confirmation turns out bad for the GOP later? It’s a gamble either way, but Grassley is up for reelection in Iowa, (a battleground state), and looking reasonable might help pull some Dem and independent votes over to him, offsetting any negative reaction the Tea Party would no doubt give him. Iowans might want to stick with a judiciary committee chair/senior member rather than taking a gamble on a newly elected senator getting any sort of say in the Senate. Grassley’s not the greatest of all senators, but he isn’t Mike Lee, either.