USA TODAY International Edition
Trump to unveil choice for Supreme Court on Tuesday
List of nominees is down to three from appeals courts
President Trump said Monday he will announce his Supreme Court choice Tuesday night, two days earlier than scheduled.
“I have made my decision on who I will nominate for The United States Supreme Court,” Trump tweeted. “It will be announced live on Tuesday at 8: 00 P. M. ( W. H.).”
The long- awaited announcement sets up a high- stakes battle in the Senate, where Republicans who hold a slim, 52- seat majority blocked former president Barack Obama’s choice of federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland.
Democrats, led by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, have vowed revenge for what many consider a stolen Supreme Court seat. Unless Trump can win over eight of them, Republicans will have to change the Senate’s rules, eliminating the 60- vote threshold needed to bring the nomination to the floor. Trump endorsed such a move last week.
The new president made his selection from a list of 21 people, nearly all of them federal or state judges, put together months ago by conservative interest groups. By last week, three favorites had emerged: federal appeals court judges Neil Gorsuch of Colorado, Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania and the original favorite, William Pryor of Alabama.
The goal for Trump, his aides and those groups has been to find someone in their 40s or early 50s with solidly conservative credentials who can serve on the Supreme Court for a quarter century or more. That makes the selection of more far- reaching importance than any of Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet or foreign postings.
Trump also had said he wanted a judge in the Scalia mold — one who follows the Constitution as written by the nation’s founders and federal laws as written by Congress.
While he can expect little cooperation from Democrats, Trump reached out to both sides last week, meeting with Senate leaders as well as the chairman and top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Some Democrats fear Trump wants to pack the high court with conservatives willing to roll back precedents on issues such as abortion, civil rights, environmental protection and government regulations.
Scalia’s death last Feb. 13 and President Obama’s effort to replace him with a moderate- to- liberal judge made the Supreme Court a prominent issue in the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Replacing Scalia will not shift the court ideologically from where it was a year ago, but it will put conservatives one seat short of a commanding majority. With the seat filled, the longest- serving justice, Anthony Kennedy, once again will be the man in the middle — siding with conservatives in most cases but occasionally with liberals on issues such as abortion, affirmative action and gay rights.
Scalia’s replacement won’t change the direction of the court initially.
What could change in the short term is the court’s occasional willingness to step into disputes conservatives feel are better left to the states. That could spell doom for some of Obama’s forays into areas such as health care, immigration and environmental protection.
Trump whittled his list down to three in recent days:
Neil Gorsuch, Colorado, U. S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. At 49 the youngest of the group, Gorsuch is the most natural replacement among them for Scalia. He is a strict adherent of originalism. He also has much of Scalia’s flair as a writer.
Thomas Hardiman, Pennsylvania, U. S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. A dark horse among the finalists, Hardiman, 51, isn’t unfamiliar to Trump. He sits on the same U. S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit as the president’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.
William Pryor, Alabama, U. S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. He’s been the conservatives’ justice- in- waiting for years.
But Pryor is controversial: He once criticized the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, as “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”