Judge Merrick Garland, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is a Supreme Court nominee almost too good to be true.
Judge Garland is from the heartland (Chicago). He went to Harvard on a scholarship and was the class valedictorian. He then attended Harvard Law School.
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He went on to a brilliant career. First, as a law clerk for Justice William Brennan, then a corporate lawyer in Washington, and, finally, as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice, where he worked on domestic terrorism and took on several big cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing. He has been on the D.C. court, often regarded as a “little” Supreme Court, since 1997.
The judge, by all accounts, is a deeply thoughtful jurist and a moderate one. He believes profoundly in constitutional protections but also in the legitimacy of national security concerns. He is similarly nuanced and balanced about the rights and duties of police officers.
Merrick Garland tutors inner city children. He can work cordially and collegially with those who see the law and life very differently than he does. He is able to negotiate the viper’s nest of Washington with great skill, yet without being sullied by it. And he is, according to those who know him, just a nice guy — genuinely, and, for such a gifted person, astonishingly, humble.
Would that we had a presidential candidate so well prepared and whole. Judge Garland is so right for this job that he seems almost a computer model or the creation of a novelist.
As icing on the cake, there is his age. Judge Garland is 63. So he probably won’t be tying up his seat for 35 or 40 years.
The President could not have come up with a better nominee — a man widely praised by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past.
What does it say about the brokenness of our politics — no, the absurdity of our politics — that his nomination may well be dead on arrival?
Certainly Senate Republicans wish it to be. As a caucus, they have pledged not even to hold hearings or vote on the nomination.
Why?
They say, to give the voters a voice. Let them choose the next Supreme Court justice through the next president.
Or, they say: Lame duck presidents should not be allowed to saddle the country with their choices in the last year of office.
Neither of those propositions has any basis in the Constitution.
The President has a duty to nominate, even if his time is limited, and even if his choice is a 35-year-old radical feminist Sufi priestess from Berkeley, Calif.
The Senate can vote a nomination down.
But not to even hear the President’s nominee?
The President still has almost 9 months to serve and this nominee is the epitome of prudence, balance, and qualification.
And that should be the point: the qualifications of the particular nominee.
We have completely lost sight of this in the last 30 years of judicial warfare.
In the 1950s and 1960s, up until some of Richard Nixon’s disastrous Supreme Court nominations, the Senate pretty much affirmed any nominee a president sent up to the Hill. Regardless of who controlled Congress. That was not a great way to do things.
But, since the nomination of Robert Bork, BOTH parties have politicized appointments to the federal judiciary, especially at the Supreme Court level. And that, from Mr. Bork on, has demeaned us all — the nominees who were “Borked,” the law, the citizens, and the democratic process.
It is true that neither the President nor the Vice President is blameless in this degradation. Both men, and many other Democrats, when they controlled the Senate, played politics with the courts as the Republicans are now doing.
But so what? Judge Garland IS blameless.
And he is better than the nominees we are likely to get from any of the other prospective presidents out there now.
Ironically, politics might counter politics in the end. If it looks as if the Democratic nominee is going to win big by the fall, Republicans may relent and approve Judge Garland to avoid a Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders appointment.
But the true alternative to ideology and endless, recycled brute partisanship is not cynical calculation, or going back to the rubber-stamp approach, it is to consider the individual. The actual, individual before you — his or her character, record, and ability.
Judge Garland is highly and uniquely qualified for the Supreme Court. Republican senators such as Rob Portman, who generally try to uphold comity, should do the self-evidently right thing and give him a hearing.
This is America. Judge the person.
First Published March 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
