Making SCOTUS Great Again: Trump's Supreme Court Shortlist
These 11 potential justices are well within the mainstream of conservative legal thought.
Donald Trump wants YOU… to serve on the Supreme Court! (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)
This afternoon brings bad news for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit. The chances of Judge Garland getting confirmed during the “lame duck” session of Congress, after the presidential election but before the inauguration of our new president, now depend very heavily on Hillary Clinton winning the presidency. Donald Trump just announced his shortlist of 11 possible SCOTUS nominees, and none of them are crazy enough to make Chief Judge Garland more attractive to Republicans than a Trump appointee.
Far from being crazy, the Trump SCOTUS contenders are, as columnist Kayleigh McEnany predicted they would be, very much in the vein of the late Justice Scalia. They all wouldn’t necessarily agree with the late justice on every issue, but taken as a whole, they are constitutional conservatives and textualists. They are also, by conventional standards, highly qualified; they’re all well-regarded, currently sitting federal and state judges. The Trump shortlist does not include Elisabeth Hasselbeck or Shaquille O’Neal.
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Here’s the Trump shortlist, via USA Today (in alphabetical order):
- Steven Colloton of Iowa
- Allison Eid of Colorado
- Raymond Gruender of Missouri
- Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania
- Raymond Kethledge of Michigan
- Joan Larsen of Michigan
- Thomas Lee of Utah
- William Pryor of Alabama
- David Stras of Minnesota
- Diane Sykes of Wisconsin
- Don Willett of Texas
Here’s what Trump himself had to say about the news, per the Associated Press:
In a statement, Trump said the list “is representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value” and said that, as president, he would use it “as a guide to nominate our next United States Supreme Court Justices.”
His campaign stressed the list was compiled “first and foremost, based on constitutional principles, with input from highly respected conservatives and Republican Party leadership.”
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Word on the street is that Trump consulted folks at the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation in coming up with his Supreme Court shortlist, and these eleven names are certainly consistent with that hypothesis. All are Republicans themselves or Republican appointees.
It’s interesting to see who is not on the list — usual GOP SCOTUS contenders like former Solicitor General Paul Clement, Judge Neil Gorsuch (10th Cir.), Judge Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.), and Judge Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.). This might be surprising at first glance, but it actually makes sense to me: I suspect that Donald Trump found these folks to be too “Establishment” for his tastes.
I’d say that his shortlist is, well, “Trumpy” — conservative, yes, but with a contrarian or anti-Establishment streak. It has practically no judges from the East or West Coasts, which might reflect Trump’s anti-elitism (the only judge arguably from one of the coasts is Judge Hardiman, but he’s based in Pittsburgh rather than Philadelphia, so he doesn’t really count). And it’s heavy on state judges, which might reflect Trump’s populist orientation (given that state high-court judges, unlike federal judges, are often elected).
The Trump list is almost evenly divided between federal and state judges. The federal judges are Colloton, Sykes, Gruender, Hardiman, Kethledge, and Pryor; the state-court judges are Eid, Larsen, Lee, Stras, and Willett.
Two other observations. First, as is typical for SCOTUS nominees in this day and age, the potential justices are young; they range from 41 to 58, with most in their late 40s or early 50s. Second, the Trump shortlist isn’t long on diversity. Just three of the 11 judges are women, and all 11 are white (sorry, my fellow Asian-Americans, Thomas Lee is a white guy). I told you this list was Trumpy.
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[UPDATE (9/26/2016, 4:00 p.m.): Trump has supplemented this list with ten more names.)]
What can be said about the 11 jurists on the Trump shortlist? Flip to the next page for quick bios of each of them, including ages, current courts, and law school alma maters.
