Given the intense partisan rancor surrounding the vacancy on the Supreme Court, it’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting to subject herself to a drawn-out, potentially bruising confirmation process. Enter Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican.
The former district court judge told Morning Consult that he has spoken with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) about the possibility of succeeding Justice Antonin Scalia. “It would be a privilege,” Sandoval said this weekend while he was in Washington for an annual meeting of the National Governors Association.
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Sandoval, 52, was unanimously confirmed to the federal bench in 2005, after receiving a personal recommendation from Reid. Prior to that, he served as the Silver State’s attorney general and in the state legislature, mirroring somewhat the biography of former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who held several elected offices in Arizona and was a judge before being appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981.
The governor would be a legacy pick for Obama, given that he’s Republican, Hispanic, a former federal judge and moderate on certain issues like abortion, immigration and same-sex marriage.
Given his resume, Sandoval would likely be a shoe-in under a moderate Republican administration, but given today’s hyper-partisan electoral climate, the country isn’t likely to see moderation as plus any time soon.
In a statement last week, Heller made a clear reference to Sandoval when he encouraged Obama to “use this opportunity to put the will of the people ahead of advancing a liberal agenda on the nation’s highest court. But should he decide to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, who knows, maybe it’ll be a Nevadan.”
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Democrats want Obama to pick a liberal jurist, one who could possibly tilt the direction of the nation’s highest court for a generation. Even if the president, a former constitutional law professor, did pick a moderate Republican like Sandoval, it remains unclear if he or she would even receive consideration after many Senate Republicans fell in line behind Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s position that the next president should make the pick.
But some in the GOP, fearful that a head in the sand approach will hurt them at the polls next in November, argue they at least need to hear Obama out.
The president, photographed late Friday walking out of the Oval Office with a several inches thick binder of materials on possible Scalia replacements, likely won’t make any announcement for a few weeks. White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Friday said Obama directed his staff to cast a “wide net” for candidates.
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Earnest said the president called a bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers over the weekend, including some who serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would have the first say on any nominee.
Analysts believe U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch one of the more likely candidates Obama could choose. Other possible picks range from D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan and Patricia Millett, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to the more far-fetched, like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT).
The path forward, at least on Capitol Hill, should come into focus on Tuesday after Senate Republicans hold their weekly, closed-door policy lunch to strategize about how best to proceed on the Supreme Court vacancy.
