WASHINGTON \u2014 Merrick Garland almost made it to the Supreme Court six years ago, but he was saved for a time when President Obama might need\u00a0someone palatable to Republicans\u00a0to replace a conservative justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A time like now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit \u2014 the most common stepping-stone to the Supreme Court \u2014 comes straight out of central casting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like five current justices as well as\u00a0the late\u00a0Antonin Scalia, who he would replace, Garland\u00a0attended Harvard Law School. Like Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor, he’s a former prosecutor. Like Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he comes from\u00a0the powerful D.C. Circuit court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Garland isn’t even the first Supreme Court nominee\u00a0to earn undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard,\u00a0clerk\u00a0for Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, work\u00a0at the Justice Department,\u00a0become a partner at a major Washington, D.C., law firm, and serve on the D.C. Circuit .\u00a0Roberts did all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faced with the opportunity to nominate\u00a0the court’s first Asian American, third\u00a0African\u00a0American or fifth woman in history,\u00a0Obama opted for a mild-mannered Jew from Chicago who may be the most difficult of all the potential nominees for Republicans to rebuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his brief Rose Garden remarks Wednesday, a choked-up Garland described his early years as a prosecutor seeking to convince scared mothers and grandmothers to testify against violent gang members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Trust that justice will be done in our courts without prejudice or partisanship is what in large part distinguishes this country from others,” he said. His job then as now, he added, was to make sure that “the rule of law would prevail.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 63, Garland\u00a0is older than most high court nominees.\u00a0As the top choice of\u00a0a president who prides himself on the unprecedented diversity of his\u00a0federal judges,\u00a0Garland can only be described as a nondescript white male.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His nearly two decades on the powerful appeals court should give opponents more to parse than many recent nominees with brief tenures on the bench \u2014 or in the case of Justice Elena Kagan, who nosed out Garland\u00a0in 2010, none at all. Yet a search of\u00a0his record reveals few opinions or dissents on hot-button issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last time Garland\u00a0went before the Senate, it also was controlled by Republicans, and for a while he endured the same fate he faces\u00a0now. President Bill Clinton named him to the appeals court in 1995, but his nomination languished through\u00a0the 1996 election year. Once Clinton won a second term,\u00a0Garland won confirmation by a 76-23 vote in 1997, with 32 Republicans supporting him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“He earned overwhelming, bipartisan praise from senators and legal experts alike,” Obama said. During each of his previous Supreme Court searches, the president said,\u00a0“the one name that has come up repeatedly from Republicans and Democrats alike is Merrick Garland.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If confirmed \u2014 a long shot at the moment, but not unfathomable after Election Day \u2014\u00a0Garland would be the oldest justice to join\u00a0the court since Lewis Powell, then 64, in 1972. Powell went on to serve more than 15 years, retiring in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During 19 years at\u00a0the D.C. Circuit, Garland has managed to keep a low profile. The court’s largely administrative docket has left him without known positions on issues such as abortion or the death penalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is billed as a moderate \u2014\u00a0a label that may worry liberal advocacy\u00a0groups concerned about issues such as abortion rights and gun control. At the same time, conservatives insist he’s a liberal in centrist clothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“He’s not someone who likes to issue sweeping rulings,” says David Pozen, a Columbia Law School associate professor who clerked for Garland in 2008-09. “He doesn’t favor grand pronouncements that go beyond the case at hand.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Garland is clearly left of center by one measure.\u00a0A check of his former law clerks finds 33 who went on to clerk for liberal Supreme Court justices and only 11 for conservatives. Justices who took the most ex-Garland clerks were Breyer, Ginsburg,\u00a0Kagan and retired\u00a0justice John Paul Stevens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2013, he wrote the appeals court’s decision ordering the CIA to release information about drone strikes to a federal judge, in a challenge brought by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union. Five years earlier, he ruled that suspects could not be held as enemy combatants without\u00a0verifiable evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But on criminal law, he has more frequently backed law enforcement over the rights of defendants \u2014 an area of law in which Scalia, ironically, sometimes\u00a0sided with the high court’s liberal wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One issue he dealt with, at least tangentially, has been guns. In 2007, after a D.C. Circuit panel invalidated the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, Garland unsuccessfully favored a rehearing by the full court. The Supreme Court ultimately\u00a0struck down the ban in a landmark 2008 opinion written by Scalia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During his 1995 confirmation hearings, Garland named former\u00a0Chief Justice John Marshall,\u00a0who served from 1801 to 1835,\u00a0as his favorite, echoing a sentiment expressed by Scalia and many others.\u00a0He also cited\u00a0Justice Oliver Wendell Holmesfor his writing \u2014 a skill\u00a0Scalia particularly relished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At that time and again in 2010, Republican\u00a0Sen. Orrin Hatch\u00a0praised Garland and predicted he would enjoy broad support among Republicans. But Hatch and nearly all Senate Republicans now insist they will leave Scalia’s seat open until a new president is in office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before becoming a judge, Garland was a top Justice Department official who directed\u00a0the government’s prosecution of\u00a0Timothy McVeigh\u00a0and Terry Nichols for the 1994 bombing that killed 168 people at\u00a0the\u00a0Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building\u00a0in Oklahoma City.\u00a0He also supervised the investigation of “Unabomber”\u00a0Theodore Kaczynski\u00a0and the bombing at the\u00a01996 Summer Olympics\u00a0in Atlanta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Garland clerked\u00a0for Supreme Court\u00a0Justice William Brennan, who was nominated by President\u00a0Dwight Eisenhower\u00a0but, like several GOP nominees, went on to become a liberal stalwart. Between stops at the Justice Department, he rose to become a partner in the law firm\u00a0Arnold & Porter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wife, the former Lynn Rosenman, is the granddaughter of a former\u00a0New York Supreme Court\u00a0justice who served as special counsel to Presidents\u00a0Franklin Roosevelt\u00a0and\u00a0Harry Truman. The couple has two daughters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Merrick Garland almost made it to the Supreme Court six years ago, but he was saved for a time when President Obama might need someone palatable to Republicans to replace a conservative justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":68076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":15,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2554],"class_list":["post-22722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-management"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"QPWHS6BO3RBMPFREUOTVKIOZKA","arc_canonical_url":"\/management\/2016\/03\/16\/meet-merrick-garland-obama-s-supreme-court-nominee\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n