President Obama’s just-announced Supreme Court nominee was previously a candidate to replace Attorney General Eric Holder, and would be a reliable liberal vote on issues such as abortion, gun rights, labor and the environment, according to the conservative legal activists who have been preparing for a high-stakes nomination fight ever since Justice Antonin Scalia died.
Those are just some of the findings in a dossier that the Judicial Crisis Network released Wednesday on Judge Merrick Garland, the chief of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Obama’s nominee to be the next Supreme Court justice.
The conservative legal group has been preparing for Obama’s announcement by hiring a nonprofit group tied to former GOP presidential campaigns to do opposition research on Obama’s Supreme Court short list. The group is hoping the information influences the fight in the court of public opinion, as Senate Republicans have already said they would refuse to consider the nomination.
“Rather than just kind of ceding the first days and weeks of spin while we get up to speed on the nominee, we want to make sure that we’re out there day one and know what the person really is like apart from what the president is going to say in a self-interested way,” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner last week.
In previous nomination fights, Severino did most of the research on her own, but for this showdown, she was helped by America Rising Squared, the policy arm of America Rising, a nonprofit group founded by former advisers to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. That team has the resources to examine Garland, and already has 100 people digging for dirt on Hillary Clinton, the expected Democratic presidential nominee.
“Merrick Garland has been called the ideal judge to move the Supreme Court to the left and cement President Obama’s liberal legacy for decades into the future,” AR Squared executive director Brian Rogers, who worked on Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said in a statement Wednesday. “He was recently considered for an Obama cabinet post and clerked for the court’s liberal icon, Justice William Brennan.”
“At the D.C. Circuit, Judge Garland’s vote to re-hear a landmark case striking down strict gun restrictions in Washington, D.C., is deeply concerning to all who care about our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Rogers added.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R.-Ky., responded to the Garland nomination by reiterating his insistence that the next president replace Scalia, a position that rests on “a principle and not a person,” as he put it during a Senate floor speech.
“It seems clear that President Obama made this nomination not with the intent of seeing the nominee confirmed, but rather to politicize it for the election,” McConnell said Wednesday. “Let’s let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.”
Severino said she’s not coordinating with Senate Republicans, but her research is still likely to provide political cover to the lawmakers who are refusing to take up Garland’s nomination. And that research will only continue now that the pick has been made.
“This is the highest stakes nomination that we’ve seen,” Severino told the Examiner.
