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President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Fox News ()
Date: March 16, 2016 12:00PM

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/president-obama-to-nominate-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-sources-say/2016/03/16/3bc90bc8-eb7c-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html



Merrick_Garland.jpg




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.

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.

[LIVE updates on Obama’s pick: Reactions from the GOP and more]

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.”

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.”

Obama: Supreme Court nominee 'uniquely prepared to serve immediately'
Play Video0:49
President Obama announced he is nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court March 16. Obama said Garland is widely recognized as "one of America's sharpest legal minds." (Reuters)
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.”

“I said I would take this process seriously, and I did,” the president said. “I chose a serious man and an exemplary judge.”

“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.”

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 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.”

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.”

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.

Obama: Republicans must give Supreme Court nominee 'fair hearing'
Play Video2:14
While announcing his Supreme Court nominee March 16, President Obama urged Senate Republicans to fulfill their "constitutional duty" and give Merrick Garland a "fair hearing." (Reuters)
Seven sitting Republican senators voted to confirm Garland in 1997: Dan Coats (Ind.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Orrin 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.

Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon, Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said “the next Supreme Court justice could dramatically change the direction of the court” and Americans deserved to “weigh in” before that happens.

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.

[Meet Merrick Garland: Here’s his story]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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).

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.

“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.

Options: ReplyQuote
Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: There's already a thread commrad ()
Date: March 16, 2016 12:25PM

Hey Fox, How's that Rubio man-crush working out for ya?

Options: ReplyQuote
Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Bill.N. ()
Date: March 16, 2016 12:33PM

Just what the Supreme Court needs. Another Harvard educated jurist whose past experience was limited to the Federal court system, government positions and corporate law. Would it be that radical to:
1. Have a justice who did not attend an Ivy League school?
2. Have a justice who had done extensive criminal defense at the trial level?
3. Have a justice whose judicial experience was on the state level, including experience as a state trial judge?

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Playing It Safe ()
Date: March 16, 2016 01:14PM

Bill.N. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Just what the Supreme Court needs. Another
> Harvard educated jurist whose past experience was
> limited to the Federal court system, government
> positions and corporate law. Would it be that
> radical to:
> 1. Have a justice who did not attend an Ivy League
> school?

Obama needed a judge whose educational background could not be questioned.

> 2. Have a justice who had done extensive criminal
> defense at the trial level?

Could you imagine what the right would do to a criminal defense attorney? He'd be shredded.

> 3. Have a justice whose judicial experience was on
> the state level, including experience as a state
> trial judge?

Why? Is the implication that a state judge would have more experience with real world cases?

Of course, none of these things are unreasonable. But Obama could not afford to take any chances with this nomination. I'm not happy with this choice either, but for different reasons.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Bill.N. ()
Date: March 16, 2016 04:04PM

I understand the politics of the choice too. That doesn't mean that I have to buy into them. We've been hearing about the need for diversity on the bench. Diversity isn't limited to race, gender and ethnicity. It also should reflect EXPERIENCE.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: thetruth ()
Date: March 16, 2016 05:02PM

From Politico

[R]enowned maverick McCain would entertain zero questions about meeting with a nominee or considering Garland in the lame-duck session.

“I’ve said everything I have to say on the Supreme Court nominee in a written statement,” McCain said. Confronted with possible confirmation scenarios, he said: “What about if pigs fly? What about if pigs fly or a vegetarian is elected?”


Thank God we didn't elect this jackass to the presidency. It appears, time and time again, he will only work for himself, to benefit himself. He doesn't care about the people or his country.

He has a Democratic challenger who is given him a real run this election round. Let's hope she send this clown home, come November.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Gunlover ()
Date: March 16, 2016 05:21PM

Well at least he smart enough not nominate that Gerry Indian type. They reek curry like gerry.

Options: ReplyQuote
Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Sassafras in tea ()
Date: March 16, 2016 06:09PM

Another Jew.......


And then there was 4....

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: What's Your Point? ()
Date: March 16, 2016 06:37PM

Sassafras in tea Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Another Jew.......
>
>
> And then there was 4....

Counterbalance to all the Catholics on the court. You don't seem to have a problem with that.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Garland The Gun Grabber ()
Date: March 16, 2016 06:54PM

He voted against Heller in the early stages of the case. He will join with the other libs and overturn Heller if he gets on the high court. He wont! Try again Obama. To deny the right of the people, the right to bear arms.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: The Criticizer ()
Date: March 16, 2016 07:22PM

He's got the eyes of a molester.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Sassafras in tea ()
Date: March 16, 2016 08:39PM

What's Your Point? Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sassafras in tea Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Another Jew.......
> >
> >
> > And then there was 4....
>
> Counterbalance to all the Catholics on the court.
> You don't seem to have a problem with that.

Kikes make up what? 2% of the population? There's 3 there now.... Real representative of the make up of America.... How come no gook judge? Oh, that's right....its israel....the "chosen" ones......

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: What's Your Point? ()
Date: March 16, 2016 09:02PM

Sassafras in tea Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What's Your Point? Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Sassafras in tea Wrote:
> >
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> > -----
> > > Another Jew.......
> > >
> > >
> > > And then there was 4....
> >
> > Counterbalance to all the Catholics on the
> court.
> > You don't seem to have a problem with that.
>
> Kikes make up what? 2% of the population? There's
> 3 there now.... Real representative of the make up
> of America.... How come no gook judge? Oh, that's
> right....its israel....the "chosen" ones......

I can understand why intelligent, driven people scare you. I suspect you haven't met many lawyers (well, except when looking for representation). Lawyers were at one point over 50% Jewish. Pure speculation, but I would expect 20-35% of lawyers now are Jewish. Why is that a problem? What are you afraid of?

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Jewhaterer2 ()
Date: March 16, 2016 09:04PM

What's Your Point? Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why is that a problem? What are
> you afraid of?


Jews.

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Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: There are other law schools ()
Date: March 16, 2016 09:08PM

Can we get any justice nominees not from Harvard or Yale or Princeton this time? Please?

Options: ReplyQuote
Re: President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Posted by: Vexxxed ()
Date: March 17, 2016 06:11AM

There are other law schools Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Can we get any justice nominees not from Harvard
> or Yale or Princeton this time? Please?
Attachments:
12790929_10154410164965288_8111167330408503409_n.png

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