ConfirmThem

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The Baltimore Sun has an interesting article on this topic. Here are the excerpts that caught my attention:

More so than his predecessor, Bill Clinton, or his father, George Bush, the current president has looked to the lifetime appointments he has made to the federal judiciary as a way to have a lasting ideological effect on the nation's laws, said David M. O'Brien, a political science professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics. Nowhere would the effect be more visible than on the Supreme Court.

"I see no reason to expect or predict that he is going to compromise, and if he did compromise, he would get a lot of flak from his core constituents," O'Brien said. "He's going to go to the mats."

. . . .

Much of the intrigue surrounds whether Bush would elevate a current member of the court - Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas - to the chief's post, setting the stage for two confirmation battles against the backdrop of the Senate's recent standoff over judicial nominees.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a constitutional law expert at Pepperdine University who was a top Justice Department official under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, said the simmering Senate feud over federal judges has prompted some conservatives to push for "Scalia and Thomas, and no one else," for the chief's post.

"Certainly, if you had a scrappy, intellectually able Antonin Scalia, part of the calculus would be: If he can't survive [the confirmation process], then no one can," Kmiec said.

. . . .

White House staff and advisers have completed much of that legwork, and an unofficial - and unwritten - list of the most mentioned candidates for an opening on the court has been much discussed for several years.

It includes two judges from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Maryland - J. Harvie Wilkinson III and J. Michael Luttig, who has sterling political credentials and has long been a darling of conservative legal circles. Luttig delivered one of the eulogies at the funeral of former Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1995, along with Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The list includes former University of Chicago law professor Michael W. McConnell, now a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Emilio M. Garza, a judge on the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who would offer an opportunity for Bush to appoint the first Hispanic judge to the Supreme Court. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also has been a steady Supreme Court contender.

In recent weeks, Kmiec said, contenders Samuel A. Alito Jr., a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia who is nicknamed "Scalito" because of his similar philosophy to Justice Scalia, and John Roberts Jr., named less than two years ago to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, have gained strength as candidates. That is in large part because they are seen as having the intellectual capability and temperament to serve on the court without having lengthy records of academic writing or judicial histories that could supply ammunition for critics.

(cross-posted at Southern Appeal)