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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

There's a precedent to replace 'like with like', so knowing that Scalia was very right-leaning, (if he gets the chance) Obama will very likely nominate a centrist, if not a right-leaning one. At least that seemed to previously be the case... In this new world of scorched earth politics, who knows..

Edit;

My guess for nomination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Srinivasan

He's a Stanford guy, Indian, already sailed through the Senate for a DC Court of Appeals position, disliked by Unions, and by all accounts a brilliant legal mind. He's successfully represented corporate clients (e.g. Skilling in Skilling vs. USA) and had a successful career in the private world.

This somewhat contradicts my first paragraph, but he's definitely to the right of Kagan or Sotamayor.

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While there is a tendency to replace like with like, that's because Supreme Court justices usually time their retirements to coincide with presidencies that share their views.

In this case, I doubt it applies. In theory Obama could pick a nominee closer to the center to avoid a tiresome confirmation battle, but I suspect there's a bigger bang for the buck in nominating fairly left-wing candidates and making the Republican Senate choose between looking obstructionist to the general public or looking weak to their base.

> looking obstructionist to the general public

Could you explain why this might cost the Republicans votes? Their core voters would absolutely love them standing up to the "tyranny" of Obama. Even independent/undecided voters would understand that its reasonable enough to postpone considering how close the Presidential election is.

To be clear, I think it would be best to have it completed within 3 months, like the previous 10 nominations to the court but I don't think it will cost the Republicans at all to postpone it till next year.

It can be a good call to arms for the Democrats though. If the nomination is withheld long enough, lobbies like EMILY's list will get more donations and will raise more noise. and rightly so because more is at stake.

You might very well be right, and I agree that the Republican base would prefer that the Senate just doesn't bother to consider a nominee until after the election.

However, my impression is that independent voters prefer action to inaction and typical behavior to atypical, and will be susceptible to 'the Senate is refusing to do its job' arguments from the President and the Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 'Supreme Court appointments are usually approved in XX days' arguments from the press.

We shall see.

To my knowledge, the precedent is to replace "whoever left the bench" with "whoever is likely to agree with the current President's party".

Are there any examples where a liberal president nominated a conservative or vice-versa?

(I'm not talking about situations where someone was appointed as a conservative and moved gradually left, which actually happens to all justices.)

A liberal would never elect a conservative and vice versa, but there's an expectation to maintain the court's approximate balance (which is why Scalia's death is such a big deal). So if a very right-leaning justice stepped down under a liberal president, he'd elect a center / center-left justice. If the most left-wing justice in the world stepped down, then a left-wing president could elect the most left-leaning person.

By no means a rule, but a tradition at least.

Can you provide an example of when this has happened?

The West Wing... That counts right?

Do you think Scalia moved gradually left? I've always considered him to be insanely consistent.

Sometimes "left" and "right" are useful labels, and sometimes not.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/antonin-scalia-fighter-priva...

He was intensely conservative.

Make of this what you will: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Graph_of...

As tptacek said, political labels aren't necessarily objective, so this graph would differ depending on the methodology. It's also a little harder to measure justices' leanings because there are so few data points.

Alito was nominated by Bush to replace O'Connor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito_Supreme_Court_nom...

Bush had cover since Rehnquist (pretty far right) had just been replaced Roberts (a much more moderate candidate). Even then, it was controversial for that exact reason.

So between the two justices, Alito + Roberts is definitely to the right of Rehnquist + O'Connor, but pretty moderate considering the possibility of two far-right justices.

> There's a precedent to replace 'like with like'

I've never heard of that and have reason to think otherwise: Presidents see the Supreme Court appointments as a chance to leave their mark on the judiciary. Could you provide some evidence?

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