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Thread: Supreme Court of the United States

  1. #81
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Obama to Pick Merrick Garland to Fill Supreme Court Seat

    WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday will nominate Merrick B. Garland as the nation’s 113th justice, according to White House officials, choosing a centrist appeals court judge widely respected even by Republicans in hopes his choice will be considered by the Senate.

    In deciding on Judge Garland, Mr. Obama picked a man who persevered through a lengthy political battle in the mid-1990s that delayed his own confirmation to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by more than a year. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, argued at the time that the vacancy should not be filled.

    Twenty years later, Mr. Grassley is again standing in the way of Judge Garland’s appointment, this time arguing as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the next president should be the one to pick the successor to Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly in February.

    Judge Garland is often described as brilliant and, at 63, is somewhat aged for a Supreme Court nominee. He is two years older than Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has been with the court for more than 10 years. The two served together on the appeals court and are said to be friends.

    The Oklahoma City bombing case in 1995 helped shape Judge Garland’s professional life. He coordinated the Justice Department’s response, starting the case against the bombers and eventually supervising their prosecution.

    Judge Garland insisted on being sent to the scene even as bodies were being pulled out of the wreckage, said Jamie S. Gorelick, then the deputy attorney general.

    “At the time, he said to me the equivalent of ‘Send me in, coach,’” Ms. Gorelick said. “He worked around the clock, and he was flawless.”

    Because of his position, disposition and bipartisan popularity, Judge Garland has been on Mr. Obama’s shortlist of potential nominees for years. In 2010, when Mr. Obama interviewed him for the slot that he instead gave to Justice Elena Kagan, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said publicly that he had urged Mr. Obama to nominate Judge Garland as “a consensus nominee” who would win Senate confirmation.

    “I know Merrick Garland very well,” Mr. Hatch said at the time. “He would be very well supported by all sides.”

    The president will present his nominee during a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House at 11 a.m., officials said.

    “As president, it is both my constitutional duty to nominate a justice and one of the most important decisions that I — or any president — will make,” Mr. Obama said in an email to supporters early Wednesday morning. “In putting forward a nominee today, I am fulfilling my constitutional duty. I’m doing my job. I hope that our senators will do their jobs, and move quickly to consider my nominee.”

    In the email, Mr. Obama said he considered three principles in making his choice: whether the person possessed “an independent mind, unimpeachable credentials and an unquestionable mastery of law”; whether the nominee recognized “the limits of the judiciary’s role”; and whether his choice understood that “justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook.”

    Mr. Obama said that he was “confident you’ll share my conviction that this American is not only eminently qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, but deserves a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote.”

    The White House has created a new Twitter handle, he said — @SCOTUSnom — and he urged people to follow it for “all the facts and up-to-date information.”

    At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Obama said that Republicans must “decide whether they want to follow the Constitution and abide by the rules of fair play that ultimately undergird our democracy and that ensure that the Supreme Court does not just become one more extension of our polarized politics.”

    Republican senators have urged the president to hold off on a nomination, saying the next president should make the pick after voters express their preference in the presidential election. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has repeatedly said he would oppose any nomination until next year.

    “President Obama is getting dangerously close to narrowing down the field of potential candidates for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Mr. McConnell warned his supporters in a fund-raising appeal last month.

    The outcome of the Washington clash could determine whether Mr. Obama gets to set the direction of American jurisprudence for decades. After the death last month of Mr. Scalia, a leading conservative, the court is evenly divided, with four liberal justices and four conservatives. A new justice appointed by Mr. Obama could be the deciding vote in several close cases.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/us...inee.html?_r=0
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  2. #82
    Moderator Dave from Florida's Avatar
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    One concern is that Garland clerked for William Brennan, one of the most anti-death penalty justices ever on the Supreme Court

  3. #83
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    He might not even get confirmed. If a conservative wins the election we'll be fine

  4. #84
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Conservatives to pounce if GOP relents on Supreme Court

    The 'no hearings, no vote' stance has made Mitch McConnell an unlikely hero of the right, but that could change in an instant.

    By Burgess Everett
    Politico

    There are plenty of plausible reasons why Republicans might eventually fold in the standoff over the Supreme Court: Overwhelming public opinion, a Democratic pressure campaign, and vulnerable GOP senators trying to save their jobs, to name a few.

    But there's another even more persuasive reason they won't: The wrath of the right wing.

    The activist right has been galvanized by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's quick and forceful insistence that the Senate will not take up a high court nominee for the rest of Barack Obama's presidency, spending millions already to defend the GOP position with likely lots more to come. Tea party groups that have dissed McConnell for years as an establishment sellout are singing his praises.

    It's safe to say all of that would end the instant Republicans agreed to take up Merrick Garland's nomination. And the fire would turn inward at the worst possible moment for Republicans, as the party is scrambling to save its narrow Senate majority in November.

    “If the senators start to move off of this position, the biggest problem they are going to face is going to be a loss of support … they’re going to alienate the most active part of their constituency,” said Adam Brandon, president and CEO of FreedomWorks.

    “I want Mitch McConnell to see that the potential grass-roots army is far stronger than anyone on K Street.”

    Look no further than the reaction to Sen. Jerry Moran's (R-Kan.) break with party leadership this week — he said the Senate should take up Garland's nomination — to see how important it is to the base not to fill Antonin Scalia's seat vacant this year. The conservative Judicial Crisis Network vowed a "robust" campaign against Moran to change his mind. The Tea Party Patriots threatened to back a primary challenger against the first-term senator.

    It's easy enough to imagine the entire Senate GOP getting the same treatment.

    The JCN has already spent $4 million on ads, both bucking up McConnell and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and going after Democrats from red states. The deep-pocketed group says it has the resources to keep it up as long as needed.

    The National Republican Senatorial Committee, meanwhile, has been fundraising off the Supreme Court vacancy for weeks, a tactic that works only if the party remains united. And Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion rights, has shifted its focus from the presidential campaign to holding the Senate, with plans to spend millions helping senators who oppose abortion rights.

    “This would be the worst point in history for a cave to occur and for that reason I do not believe it will,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group's president. “When there is true leadership coming out of the Senate it’s a more appealing body to defend.”

    When former House Speaker John Boehner resigned under pressure last year, all eyes shifted across the Capitol to McConnell, who's drawn more than his share of flak from the right for cutting deals with Democrats. His vow for no hearings or vote on the president's court pick instantly remade the majority leader's reputation with his conservative adversaries. But the dynamic could change just as quickly if he backs away.

    "If Republican senators can't fulfill the basic task of defending the Constitution, they should be defeated at the ballot box," said Ken Cuccinelli of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that consistently works against McConnell.

    McConnell's confidants say the message has been received. People close to him say he's holding the line 100 percent, and that the Republican Conference overwhelmingly has his back. McConnell appeared on four Sunday political shows this month to repeat at length his plans to allow voters "to weigh in” before the vacancy is filled.

    “This is first time I find myself praising Mitch," said Brandon of FreedomWorks.

    “I don’t think [conservatives] would be happy. I wouldn’t be happy” if McConnell relented, said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas. “The idea that anybody is sort of exerting pressure and somebody’s going to crack is just not reality.”

    While a growing number of Republicans say they will meet with Garland, just three GOP senators — Moran and moderates Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois — have truly broken with the leader and called for hearings and consideration of Garland’s nomination. GOP senators such as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio, all of whom face tough reelection campaigns, say they will meet with Garland merely to reiterate their position that the seat should be filled by the next president.

    Democrats believe McConnell is motivated by self-preservation. Siding with activists on the Supreme Court, they say, could help the majority leader avoid Boehner's fate.

    “I do believe he’s going to lose the majority. And he’s hoping that 2018 is going to be better [electorally] and he wants to save his job so he’s around [to return to majority leader] in 2018,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview. “He’s actually saving himself and sacrificing his people that are up this time. He knows what happened to Boehner.”

    Democrats would have socked McConnell for his handling of the Supreme Court no matter what. If he slow-walked the nomination, he would have been criticized for wasting time. And if Garland made it to the floor only to lose a vote, McConnell would have been accused of forcing his members to vote down a nomination of a qualified justice.

    By planting his flag early, McConnell ensured praise from unlikely allies. If he holds firm, it could temper criticism from the right of his deal-making with Democrats and perhaps stoke Republican turnout in November.

    “It is an example of leading ... when you lead you take a principled position and you stick with it," said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a tea party favorite who lost a Senate bid in 2010. “Would people be upset if they say they’re taking a principled position and then back off of that? ... That would be a problem.”

    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...connell-221161
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  5. #85
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Who’s Who on Trump’s Supreme Court Wish List

    Judge Steven Colloton, who lives in Iowa, has been a judge since 2003 for the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Allison Eid has been an associate justice on the Colorado Supreme Court.

    Judge Raymond Gruender has served on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2004.

    Judge Thomas Hardiman, 50, joined the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007.

    Justice ​Joan Larsen, who serves on the Michigan Supreme Court.

    Thomas Lee of Utah​ is ​an associate justice of the Utah Supreme Court​.

    Justice David Stras was a 35-year-old criminal law professor in Minnesota when he was appointed to the state’s highest court in 2010.

    Judge Diane Sykes, 58, who sits on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

    Texas Supreme Court Justice Don R. Willett a 49-year-old Republican, was first elected to the state bench in 2006 and re-elected in 2012.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/05/18/...ourt-nominees/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  6. #86
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Divided Supreme Court opens new term that could bring historic shift

    An evenly divided Supreme Court opens a new term this week with a few dozen mostly low-profile cases. But perhaps the biggest question of the year won’t even be settled by the justices.

    Instead, voters this November will effectively decide the court’s ideological bent for the next four years and possibly much longer.

    Not since 1968 has the high court had a vacancy expected to be filled by the winner of a presidential election.

    RELATED: Supreme Court set to decide cases on insider trading, death penalty and aid to church schools »

    Back then, Senate conservatives filibustered President Lyndon Johnson’s choice to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, leaving Richard Nixon to nominate a conservative instead, the start of a quarter-century of Republican appointments that steadily moved the court to the right.

    Now, with the GOP-led Senate’s refusal to consider President Obama’s candidate, Merrick Garland, to fill the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, the high court faces the prospect of a similarly historic shift, albeit in the opposite direction and potentially moving much faster.

    If GOP nominee Donald Trump wins in November, conservatives are likely to restore their 5-4 majority, based on the names of prospective nominees his campaign has released.

    But a Hillary Clinton victory would give the court a majority of Democratic appointees for the first time since 1969. The Senate could decide to approve Garland in the lame-duck session at the end of the year, or leave the choice to Clinton after she takes office in January.

    Either way, it would represent the most liberal high court since the early 1970s.

    So what would change?

    For starters, liberals could score some short-term victories early next year on several hot-button issues involving Obama’s executive actions and regulations — on immigration, climate change, contraceptives and rights for transgender students.

    This past spring, the justices put off several decisions, given the current 4-4 split among Republican and Democratic appointees. For example, they did not decide whether employers at religious schools and colleges can be required to provide free contraceptives for their female employees under the terms of Obama’s healthcare law. That issue remains unresolved, but a fifth Democratic appointee could form a majority to uphold the so-called contraceptive mandate.

    In June, the court split, 4-4, on Obama’s plan to defer deportation and offer work permits to more than 4 million immigrants who have been living in the U.S. illegally. The tie vote kept in place a Texas judge’s order that has halted Obama’s policy.

    But the case is still pending, and with a fifth Democratic appointee, the court would probably clear the way for the administration to put its policy into effect.

    Similarly, earlier this year — shortly before Scalia’s death in February — the court by a 5-4 vote temporarily blocked Obama’s plan to limit carbon pollution from power plants. That case is working its way through the U.S. appeals court and is certain to return to the Supreme Court for a final review, possibly as early as next spring.

    The growing dispute over transgender students using bathrooms that match their gender identity could be taken up early next year. A Virginia school district has filed an appeal challenging a decree issued by Obama’s Education Department.

    The court has also agreed to decide a potentially significant church-state dispute, but has put off scheduling arguments, apparently waiting for a ninth justice. At issue is whether a church day-care center in Missouri can claim an equal right to state-subsidized playground materials provided to public schools.

    A final major decision could come in the area of voting rights. In recent years, Republican-led states have adopted new election laws that limit early voting and require voters to display specific state-issued photo IDs at the polls. These measures have been challenged by civil rights lawyers and the Justice Department who claim that they are designed to restrict voting by African Americans and Latinos.

    The court is set to hear cases from North Carolina and Virginia, where Republican lawmakers are accused of setting election boundaries so that black voters are concentrated in a few districts in order to strengthen the GOP in surrounding areas.

    “There is no doubt that a liberal court would be more sensitive to claims of voter suppression like we’ve seen in North Carolina and Texas and more vigilant against racial gerrymandering,” said Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU’s national legal director.

    Longer term, liberals would have their first opportunity in generations to tee up potentially landmark cases on issues such as partisan gerrymandering, political spending and protecting gays from workplace discrimination.

    When conservatives held the majority, liberal and progressive advocacy groups often tried to prevent sensitive issues, like abortion and affirmative action, from reaching the high court. But with a majority of Democratic-appointed justices on the bench, liberal think tanks and civil rights groups would — for the first time in years — have incentives to cultivate precedent-setting lawsuits and push their issues to the Supreme Court.

    For their part, many conservatives say that the prospect of a liberal Democrat filling Scalia’s seat is driving support for Donald Trump.

    “It could mean rolling back at the 2nd Amendment and cutting back on religious liberty,” said Elizabeth Slattery, a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “Citizens United is also on the hit list for the left,” she said, referring to the 2010 decision that knocked down limits on independent campaign spending by corporations and unions.

    She said a liberal court “would not be a check against out-of-control executive power. If Hillary is in office, she could use unelected bureaucrats to achieve the goals she could not win in Congress.”

    Legal scholars, however, doubt a newly liberal court would move quickly or aggressively, particularly if the new justice is Garland, who is seen as a moderate.

    “My guess is the shift would be fairly slow and incremental, rather than sudden and dramatic,” said University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. “The so-called liberals on the court are by nature and experience fairly cautious and moderate.”

    Conservatives learned that even with a majority, sudden or sweeping change is often difficult to achieve.

    When Republicans came to dominate the court in the 1970s and ‘80s, conservatives confidently took aim at liberal precedents like the Miranda decision on police warnings, the Roe vs. Wade ruling on abortion and the Bakke decision allowing race-based affirmative action in colleges and universities.

    Despite repeated legal attacks, all three precedents remain standing.

    “No matter who a Democratic president appointed, the center of gravity would be with [Justices] Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan,” said Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor under President Bill Clinton. “This is not a court that is likely to set about overturning precedents.”

    http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...nap-story.html
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  7. #87
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Related to Furman VS Georgia

    Jack Greenberg, civil rights lawyer who helped argue Brown v. Board, dies at 91

    Mr. Greenberg, who died Oct. 12 at 91, joined the New York-based legal organization in 1949, fresh out of Columbia Law School. At the time, civil rights law was a small field frequently overlooked by ambitious white lawyers, but Mr. Greenberg said he was invigorated by the principles at stake and the intellectual challenge on hand.

    When Marshall left the fund in 1961 for a federal appellate judgeship — later becoming U.S. Solicitor General and then, in 1967, the first black Supreme Court justice — he hand-picked Mr. Greenberg as director-counsel of the fund, often called LDF.

    Mr. Greenberg spent 23 years at its helm, taking to the high court a series of major cases involving desegregation, employment discrimination and what he lambasted as the racially biased application of the death penalty.

    After the civil rights era, Mr. Greenberg expanded his legal work to racial discrimination in employment and the death penalty.

    Mr. Greenberg also helped argue Furman v. Georgia, a 1972 Supreme Court case that drew attention to what LDF lawyers said in part was the capricious application of the death penalty, including an inherent racial bias. The court invalidated existing death-penalty laws, only to reinstate them four years later in another ruling after many states issued revised sentencing laws.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...fae_story.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #88
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    The Election Changed The Politics Of The Supreme Court

    Overnight, Donald Trump stopped the law’s leftward shift

    By Chris Geidner
    Buzzfeed News

    Merrick Garland will not be on the Supreme Court.

    With Donald Trump’s election, the leftward shift of the American legal landscape has been halted in its tracks.

    Earlier this year, as liberals had prepared for a progressive majority on the high court for the first time in generations, Donald Trump proposed a list of 21 names for his potential picks for Supreme Court vacancies.

    Now, with Trump’s election, it is his vision — with a Republican-led Senate — that will control what comes next for the federal judiciary.

    Trump’s list of possible judicial nominees included some — like 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Sykes — who would have been on any Republican candidate’s Supreme Court shortlist.

    But the list also included some — like Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, with a well-known Twitter account — who could dramatically alter the style and spirit of the court.

    Now, in addition to putting together an administration, Trump also will have to decide how he is going to make his first mark on the Supreme Court.

    A Google-cached version of the Trump campaign’s potential Supreme Court justice picks news release.Via webcache.googleusercontent.com

    Trump does not, of course, need to keep to the list. In fact, the news release announcing the completion of the 21-member list was removed from the Trump campaign website sometime after Monday evening. The original news release of 11 names was also removed from the campaign website sometime after Sunday morning. [Update: It appears that all news releases from the campaign — including, for example, Trump’s December 2015 call for a ban on Muslim immigration — were removed from the website in recent days.]

    The Senate could potentially give Trump even greater control over the future of the courts, as well.

    The filibuster — long used as a procedural hurdle to allow the opposition party some control over preventing the most extreme of nominations by requiring 60 votes to end debate on an issue — was diminished in 2013, when Democrats ended it as a requirement for lower-court judicial nominees. Earlier this year, Sen. Lindsey Graham said that it was likely that the filibuster would, eventually, be ended as to Supreme Court nominees as well.

    “There’ll come a day when you have a Republican or Democratic president with a Republican or Democratic Senate, and they’re going to change the rules on the Supreme Court,” he said in March.

    Come Jan. 20, 2017, there will be a Republican president with a Republican Senate. If Democrats don’t allow an up-or-down vote on the nominee Trump puts forward, expect Graham’s warning — which he presumed at the time was a warning to Republicans — to become a reality.

    After all of that, though, filling the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia’s death with a conservative will not change the balance of the court on most high-profile ideological disputes. But Tuesday’s elections stop the leftward shift.

    Once Scalia’s seat is filled, Chief Justice John Roberts will regain control of a marginally functional majority on the court — with Justice Anthony Kennedy serving, yet again, as the key vote on a number of cases.

    The future of the court — a potential long-term conservative resurgence — will, ultimately, depend on what happens after that and whether Trump also gets to name a successor to a justice on the left side of the court’s bench.

    If that happens, which is entirely possible given the ages of the justices, then the progressive possibility could become a conservative, long-term reality.

    https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidne...7y#.oyv9lLrryW
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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  9. #89
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Trump May Be Close to Naming Supreme Court Pick

    President-elect Donald Trump may announce his Supreme Court pick very soon – or at least he may be narrowing down his 21 potential nominees to three or four.

    This choice matters so much because Trump's nominee could sway the direction of the court and Americans' rights for decades to come.

    The Trump transition team is moving faster than many in recent years. So it wouldn't be surprising if he also announces his Supreme Court nominee early. After all, this was one of the biggest issues for voters this election.

    Voters Cared about the Court

    John Malcolm is the Heritage Foundation's point-man on this topic. He told CBN News, "It was something like 74, 75 percent of people who voted said the Supreme Court was either an important or the most important issue that they voted for. And I think I saw that they broke about two- or three-to-one in favor of Trump."

    Malcolm is a legal expert who came up with eight nominees, six of whom made it to Trump's list of 21 judicial nominees he's promised to pick from. Malcolm said all are distinguished and believe in adhering to the Constitution.

    "They're very thoughtful individuals who've written a lot of opinions; they've written a lot of law review articles; they've taught," Malcolm said. "They'll look at the text and structure of the Constitution and will interpret that according to its original public meaning at the time those phrases were ratified. And that is very, very important and meaningful to conservatives."

    Malcolm insisted it would have been very different with a Hillary Clinton presidency, as the Senate's minority leader pointed out.

    Hillary Would've Turned the Court Left

    "Chuck Schumer made it quite clear on a number of occasions when he said 'if you elect Hillary Clinton as president and you make me the Senate majority leader, a progressive Supreme Court is my number one goal,'" Malcolm recalled.

    Big cases await, with the justices reportedly holding off on some of the more controversial ones until a new president nominates a ninth justice to break the present 4-4 tie. As Malcolm put it, "There's the transgender bathroom case issue, and then there are other cases involving religious liberty and the death penalty and criminal justice issues."

    And one very important issue that's generally been overlooked: not only will Trump choose the late Antonin Scalia's replacement, during his presidency he may also pick about a third of the judges on lower federal courts, which make many more rulings than the High Court itself.

    "The Supreme Court decides between 70 and 80 cases per year," Malcolm said. "In the 13 federal courts of appeal last year, they decided 55,000."

    This Pick Could Be First of Several

    Trump could possibly nominate three, or even four, Supreme Court justices.

    "On Inauguration Day, Stephen Breyer is going to be 78 years old; Anthony Kennedy is going to be 80 years old, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is going to be 83 years old," Malcolm noted.

    "I don't wish any of them ill health whatsoever, but they will each have already lived longer than the average life span for a man or woman in this country. So the odds are very high that over the next four years to eight years, one, two or possibly all three of them may resign or frankly die in office as Justice Scalia did this past February," he said.

    With the president-elect likely to have not just one but several Supreme Court vacancies to fill, it won't be surprising if someday history talks about not just a Reagan court or a Roosevelt court, but a Trump court as well.

    http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics...eme-court-pick
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  10. #90
    Senior Member CnCP Addict TrudieG's Avatar
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    I just hope Trump picks someone who will uphold the laws as they are now.

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