The White House has signaled that tonight, at 8:00pm Eastern, the President will name his nominee to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Trump has promised that his pick would come from a list of 21 names he announced during his campaign. In the last week or so, those names have been whittled down to three likely possibilities.
Join @POTUS Trump tonight at 8pm EST as he announces his #SCOTUS pick! We’ll be streaming the historic event LIVE: https://t.co/eyVqKv25A3 pic.twitter.com/ffobmBxK1b
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 31, 2017
Below is a short bio on each of the judges rumored to still be in contention. The three front runners for the nomination are judges Neil Gorsuch, Thomas Hardiman and William Pryor. Here are a few words from the great profiles SCOTUSBlog has done each of these judges, and a link to the longer text.
Neil Gorsuch:
In short, Gorsuch definitely has a different take from Scalia on the administrative state — one that grants it less power, and so accords even more closely with the conservative conception of small government. Indeed, this is an area in which Gorsuch is plainly a thought leader, expressing judicial sentiments many conservatives with similar concerns have rarely voiced, and which even Scalia might have bristled at. But given their parallel commitments to textualism and their parallel understandings of the relative roles of agencies and courts, even this seems like a bridgeable divide between Gorsuch and the justice he might replace. Gorsuch is still a very natural choice for any Republican president to nominate as a replacement for Scalia — someone who would espouse similar principles, stand firm on similar doctrinal commitments, reach similar outcomes, and even fill a similar role as one of the court’s most articulate defenders of conservative judicial theory.
Read more at SCOTUSBlog here.
Thomas Hardiman:
During his nearly ten years as a federal appeals court judge, Hardiman has weighed in on a variety of hot-button topics important to Republicans, and his votes in these cases have consistently been conservative. For example, the gun rights cases in which Hardiman has participated reflect an originalist approach to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Although he rejected a Second Amendment challenge to the general constitutionality of the federal law barring felons from possessing firearms, last year he concurred in a pair of challenges to the law by two men who had been convicted of corruption of a minor and carrying a handgun without a license, respectively. Hardiman agreed with the would-be gun owners that, at least as applied to them, the federal law violates the Constitution. He explained that “the threshold question in a Second Amendment challenge is one of scope: whether the Second Amendment protects the person, the weapon, or the activity in the first place. This,” he continued, “requires an inquiry into ‘text and history.’” Based on that inquiry, he concluded that “the most cogent principle that can be drawn from traditional limitations on the right to keep and bear arms is that dangerous persons likely to use firearms for illicit purposes were not understood to be protected by the Second Amendment” – a category into which the individuals in this case, in his view, did not fall. Relying on this principle, Hardiman also joined an unpublished and unsigned opinion rejecting a Second Amendment challenge to the federal and state bars on gun ownership by an inmate released from prison after serving time for armed robbery.
Hardiman’s opinion in Drake v. Filko is a strong statement of his commitment to a more expansive view of the Second Amendment. The case was a challenge to a New Jersey law regulating the issuance of permits to carry handguns in public. Among other things, the gun owner seeking a permit is required to show that he has a “justifiable need” to carry the gun. The panel ruled in favor of the state, but Hardiman dissented from that ruling. He emphasized that the Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago both “indicate that the Second Amendment extends beyond the home,” and that – at least in his view – the law violates the Second Amendment. After considering the case at three different conferences, the Supreme Court declined to review the case on the merits, as it did with several other cases presenting the same question.
Read more at SCOTUSBlog here.
William Pryor:
As attorney general Pryor advocated strongly for states’ rights. For example, he testified that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is “an affront to federalism”, co-authored a brief arguing that portions of the Americans with Disabilities Act exceeded Congressional authority, represented the only state that filed a brief arguing that the Violence Against Women Act was unconstitutional, and praised the Rehnquist court as “in matters of federalism is principled, coherent, and true to the text and structure of the Constitution.” In a speech entitled “The Supreme Court as Guardian of Federalism,” Pryor ended with: “Although the ACLU would argue that it is unconstitutional for me, as a public official, to do this in a government building, let alone at a football game, I will end with my prayer for the next administration: Please God, no more Souters.”
Read more at SCOTUSBlog here.