According to Reuters and the Washington Post, President Obama has narrowed down his list of possible Supreme Court nominees to three: Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the same court; and Paul Watford, a judge on the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Srinivasan, 49, was born in India and emigrated as a young child with his family to Kansas. A Stanford Law graduate, he would be the high court’s first Asian American and first Hindu.
Srinivasan was nominated in May 2013 to be a judge on the Washington-based appeals court. The Senate confirmed him, 97 to 0. […]
Garland served several stints in the Justice Department and supervised such major cases as the prosecutions of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Garland was appointed to the federal circuit court in April 1997 and became chief judge in February 2013. […]
[Watford] worked for four years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles before joining the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, where he focused on appellate litigation in state and federal courts. He was appointed by Obama to the federal appeals court in May 2012 after a Senate confirmation vote of 61 to 34.
Srinivasan has the advantage of having recently been confirmed—unanimously—by Republicans currently in office, making their opposition particularly ridiculous. He's young, for a SCOTUS justice. The advantage the White House might have with Garland is that he's not young—he's 63. Republicans might be a little more willing to relent for a justice that could be on the court for a shorter time. And someone in the last decades of his career might be more willing to go through the wringer Republicans are promising than a younger person. Watford is just 48, and while a more controversial appointment than Srinivasan, has also been approved by the Senate during Obama's term.
They are all safe nominees from the White House's perspective, maybe a little too safe from a progressive standpoint. It would be fantastic to see a woman on this short list, or all candidates to be people of color. But these are nominees that Republicans will look really bad for vilifying, candidates that are not by anyone's standard objectionable.
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