>>15920875 pb
>No coincidences
>>15920715 pb
wonder what see yellow means?
FYI - see yellow
From:ssolow@hillaryclinton.com
To: john.podesta@gmail.com, jsullivan@hillaryclinton.com
Date: 2016-02-29 01:33
Subject: FYI - see yellow
Tom Goldstein <http://www.scotusblog.com/author/tom-goldsteinPublisher
Posted Tue, February 16th, 2016 5:25 pm
Email Tom <tgoldstein@scotusblog.com>
Bio & Post Archive » <http://www.scotusblog.com/author/tom-goldstein>
Continued thoughts on the next nominee (and impressions of Judge Ketanji
Brown Jackson)
My thinking about the likely nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia
continues to evolve.His untimely death surprised everyone.The White
House is now compiling a list. Democrats are gearing up to support
whatever nominee is chosen. Republicans are shaping their message in
opposition to any possible candidate.
I discussed my sense of the political calculus in earlier post. Here it
is, along with some additional elaboration. I follow it with an
explanation for why my thinking on the next nominee has evolved from Ninth
Circuit Judge Paul Watford to Attorney General Loretta Lynch (both of whom
will almost certainly get serious consideration) to U.S. District Judge
Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Republicans hold the ultimate power of confirmation. So it makes sense to
start our analysis with them. There are fifty-four Republican senators.
Four would have to vote for the nominee on the merits. Fourteen would have
to vote to end a filibuster. The former is unlikely.
If not Lynch, who? There does not seem to be any obvious candidate in the
federal courts of appeals. But there is a district judge.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is a judge on the U.S. District Court for the
District of Columbia. She was confirmed by without any Republican
opposition in the Senate not once, but twice. She was confirmed to her
current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated
opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the
U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair).
She is a young – but not too young (forty-five) – black woman. Her
credentials are impeccable. She was a magna cum laude graduate of
Harvard College and cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. She
clerked on the Supreme Court (for Justice Stephen Breyer) and had two other
clerkships as well. As a lawyer before joining the Sentencing Commission,
she had various jobs, including as a public defender.
Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young
daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school
principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the
basis for the television show The Wire) and is now a law student, and she
is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.
Judge Brown Jackson’s credentials would be even stronger if she were on the
court of appeals rather than the district court and if she had been a judge
for longer than three years. One person whom I know who has been deeply
and directly involved in prior confirmations is confident the president
would not nominate someone from the district court.
I disagree because these are special circumstances. It is easy to see a
political dynamic in which candidate Hillary Clinton talks eagerly and
often about Judge Brown Jackson in the run-up to the 2016 election, to
great effect.