Washington – Obama Meets Top Lawmakers to Discuss Supreme Court Selection

Washington – President Obama will meet today with top congressional leaders to discuss the vacancy created by Justice John Paul Stevens, who plans to retire at the end of this court term. Some Democrats have called for Obama to select someone who didn’t attend an Ivy League law school, or for a liberal voice to rival conservative justice Antonin Scalia.

But the Democrats who will attend the meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), have repeatedly expressed a different concern: they want the court to include people with experience outside of federal judiciary. All nine current justices were nominated while serving on one of the nation’s appeals courts — even Stevens, the only non-Ivy League graduate among them.

“I would like to see more people from outside the judicial monastery, somebody who has had some real-life experience, not just as a judge insulated,” Leahy said last year, even before Sonia Sotomayor was selected.

The senator has again complained of the “judicial monastery” since Stevens retired, and Reid has also touted this view. Aides to both men yesterday were not sure how sharply the senators will press this view to Obama, nor if the president will listen. Like most Senate Democrats, Leahy and Reid are almost certainly to back whoever Obama picks.

The president has already begun talking to some of the candidates he is interested in, according to a person close to the process who described him as having “conversations rather than interviews.” The president has begun “actively working on this” and more formal interviews are expected in the days ahead.

But the names publicly floated by the administration have been dominated by people with traditional backgrounds for the current Supreme Court, such as Solicitor General Elena Kagan, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Merrick B. Garland of Washington, D.C., and U.S. Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood of Chicago. Kagan has not been a judge before, but she served as dean of the Harvard Law School before taking her current post and has spent much of her professional career in legal jobs.

Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, a former Arizona governor and a former federal prosecutor, is one of the leading non-judges rumored to under consideration.

This idea to tap a non-judge is not new. President Bush, following advice Leahy offered back in 2005 as well, nominated his longtime aide Harriet Miers, who was shunned by conservatives so aggressively that she eventually withdrew from the process.

One of the more prominent defenders of the current Court is the nominee who sailed through the nomination process right before Miers’ failure: Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts, according to the New York Times, said in a speech last year that having more former judges has resulted in a “more legal perspective and less of a policy perspective.”

With former governors and legislators on the Court, “the practice of constitutional law, how constitutional law was made, was more fluid and wide ranging than it is today, more in the realm of political science,” Roberts said.

Ed Whelan, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and frequent critic of Obama judicial nominees, said “the best training for a Supreme Court justice is experience as a judge.”

And he criticized Democrats who want a person outside of the judiciary, arguing they want someone who will take liberal positions better suited for electoral politics.

“It’s no surprise that folks who want Supreme Court justices to act like politicians would want politicians to become Supreme Court justices,” he said.

Democrats who are pushing for a non-judge cast their view as instead looking, in the words of former President Clinton, for “people that have seen how the lofty decisions of the Supreme Court affect the ordinary lives of Americans.”