President Resists Politics and Puts Moderate SCOTUS Pick in GOP

President Barack Obama admirably made a choice to nominate the best-qualified judge to the Supreme Court this week, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland. Republicans have already promised to play politics over the appointment, so the President could have very easily have thrown some red meat to the crowd by nominating a woman, a Latino, etc., in order to rile up his party’s base for the November presidential election. He didn’t and neither should the Senate.

The President also didn’t view the vacancy as a right to score a victory for his party by trying to get the most ideological justice he could find onto the bench, the way Republicans are promising to do if they win the White House. President Obama simply offered up the best judge for the job, who happens to be a very moderate, reasonable candidate. That’s called leadership and Republicans should be taking notes, because no one on their side of the aisle is showing any whatsoever on this issue.

For a party that so often talks about protecting the sanctity of the Constitution, they are quick to flout it whenever its rules do not suit them. The President has a constitutional responsibility to nominate a justice, and the Senate has an obligation to "advise and consent." There is no time limit stipulated, but hearings typically take a few days or less. The intent of the framers was clearly to serve the functionality of the country’s highest court, not to create a political football with which politicians should tussle.

President Obama has won two Presidential elections and won them handily. Even in his final year, in which Presidents often have their lowest approval ratings, a majority of Americans approve of the job he’s doing–much higher than the Republican-led Congress, by the way. Yet Republicans are claiming that because he has only 10 months left in office, there is some sort of secret rule that prevents him from selecting a justice.

This is true neither historically nor constitutionally. That doesn't matter, because despite the rhetoric, this resistance is about neither. It’s about the continued refusal of the party to accept the legitimacy of his Presidency that started with the absurd "birther" movement and has now come full circle to the party’s current position, as it sits poised to nominate the President Obama is a Muslim plant from Africa team’s biggest cheerleader as its candidate for the same very office, a fascist bigot who possesses only a rudimentary understanding of the office or the Constitution, himself.

"We’re not going to let the President use this opportunity to stack the Supreme Court with liberal justices," has been the rallying cry since Anton Scalia passed away last month. Instead, Republican candidates have sworn to pack it with ideological conservatives into perpetuity, should they get hold of the White House in November. True to his form, the President has not jumped into the ideological gutter. Facing no shortage of heat from his party and closest supporters for choosing not to strike back in a way that would be politically advantageous to them, he instead did the right thing by nominating the best qualified judge. Period.

Merrick Garland, who was the lead federal prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case, has served honorably on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit since 1997, where he has been that court’s Chief Judge since 2013. In his nearly two-decades on the second most high-profile court in the country, Garland has established a well-earned reputation as a top-shelf judge among legal scholars, as well as the current Supreme Court, where more than 40 of his clerks have gone on to clerk, many for conservative justices. Garland would arrive ready to work on day one and with the deep respect of his colleagues in tow.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law who's something of an expert on the work of the D.C. Circuit, recently told the Washington Post, "Chief Judge Garland’s jurisprudence is the epitome of centrist, case-by-case adjudication–not because he lacks deep methodological commitments, but because he’s never been prone to go out of his way to wax philosophical about those commitments. He has a remarkable dearth of separate opinions, and even his majority opinions tend to be fairly efficient, technical resolutions of the legal questions before him."