Who will Trump pick to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy? We have some clues: “It will be somebody from that list,” the president said Wednesday, referring to the 25 names he published in November. Reports since then have narrowed down these top contenders to five insider favorites. “We have to pick one that’s going to be there for 40 years, 45 years,” Trump also said, suggesting a judge’s relative youth may be a deciding factor. There are six women on the list, and one in pretty much everyone’s top five. Interestingly, none of these six went to the Ivies, already a point of difference from the current nine. Plus, women tend to live longer than men, maximizing the longevity factor for a lifetime appointee. And the appointment of a female justice would (a) Be helpful to a White House with preexisting women problems, while (b) making Democrat’s full-scale resistance to the pick harder and potentially more costly.
Here’s a look at the women who might make the Court:
Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana is a Seventh Circuit judge and has been on everyone’s list of likely finalists and, at 46, is among the youngest women on the list. As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out in Bloomberg, “it cannot be good for conservatism that all three women now on the court are liberals.” And it will look especially not good if the court reconsiders Roe. Barrett was a law professor at her alma mater Notre Dame until her federal appointment, and a lifelong Catholic, which you may recall from the bizarre questions asked of her by Dianne Feinstein during her confirmation hearing. (“The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” the California senator said.) There’s much more to Barrett than her judicial record, her relationship with God, and her gender, of course. We’ll probably be hearing more about her. No shortage of it from her students at Notre Dame, who fondly remember her as a mentor of rare quality. “Amy Coney Barrett is someone who spent the time and energy in teaching and mentoring, cultivating good students of the law,” a former student close to the Trump administration, who asked not to be named to maintain the appearance of neutrality, told TWS Friday. “Compared to other law professors, it’s clear that she cares about people—her students would all attest to that.” Classmates look back on their time with Barrett fondly, this student said. In more ways than one, “She’s a favorite.”
Another of the favorites is the Tenth Circuit’s Allison Eid. Fifty-three years old, Eid replaced Neil Gorsuch on the federal appeals court last year. She clerked for Justice Thomas, and the recommendation he wrote for her nomination to Colorado’s Supreme Court recalled a strength of conviction and a style of thought and debate that former colleagues say was shaped by her time with Thomas. “Allison did not vacillate because others disagreed,” Thomas wrote in his recommendation: “She engaged in constructive debate about very difficult matters, always looking for a way to solve the problem.” Eid, a married mother of two, was raised by a single mom in Spokane and won a scholarship to attend Stanford where she earned her B.A., before attending law school at the University of Chicago. As a law professor, Eid was a mentor to Colorado Senator Cory Gardner—who introduced her at her confirmation hearing last year. “Justice Eid will side with what the law says,” Gardner told the Judiciary Committee. “And she will do it in that commonsense Westerner way.”
Another former professor, Sixth Circuit Judge Joan Larsen, 49, clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia before serving as a deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush. Most of her career, however, has been in academia: Larsen was a law professor at the University of Michigan until her appointment to the Michigan Supreme Court in 2015, months before Trump nominated her to the federal appeals court. At her confirmation hearing, Larsen said she’d been surprised to find herself on Trump’s list. The Seventh Circuit’s Diane Sykes, 60, on the other hand, has been a likely SCOTUS nominee before. After her 2004 appeals court nomination, Wisconsinite Sykes’ name came up among those then President Bush would pick were a vacancy to arise in his second term. Her rulings have made headlines over the years, especially on religious liberty and voter ID laws. Trump singled her out as a favorite last February on Meet the Press.
A lesser-known contender, Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces Judge Margaret Ryan, 54, is a former Justice Thomas clerk with a fearsomely powerful resume: She attended Notre Dame Law School on a military scholarship after multiple Marine Corps deployments and served as a JAG officer for four years before her clerkship. Her confirmation to the Armed Forces appeals court came in 2006.
Ryan, Sykes, Larsen and Eid were all among the 21 names candidate Trump listed during the campaign while Barrett was a November addition—along with Georgia Supreme Court Justice Britt Grant, the youngest on the list at age 40 and a nominee to Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals who is awaiting confirmation: The mother of two, a veteran of the Bush White House, was one of the federal court nominees Arizona senator Jeff Flake held up amid tariff negotiations. “I could tell, even at her very young age, that here was someone committed to public service and mature beyond her years,” said Grant’s former White House colleague and Weekly Standard contributor Tevi Troy. “To see her listed above Brett Kavanaugh, for whom she worked, was really cool,” he added.
