THE SUPREME COURT NOMINEE-IN-WAITING
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/sri-srinivasan-dc-circuit-nominee-supreme-court.html
The next Supreme Court confirmation hearing begins on Wednesday afternoon, April 10th. Technically, Sri Srinivasan is just a candidate for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but few are misled. The stakes in this nomination are clear: if Srinivasan passes this test and wins confirmation, hell be on the Supreme Court before President Obamas term ends.
The D.C. Circuit has long operated as a Supreme Court farm team (John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg played their AAA ball there), and Republicans have worked with zeal, and amazing success, to keep Obama from placing a single judge on that court. Just last month, Caitlin Halligan, an eminently qualified New York prosecutor whose confirmation had been shamefully blocked by Senate Republicans for more than two years, withdrew her candidacy. Srinivasan is next up for consideration.
Srinivasan, who is forty-six years old, is currently the Obama Administrations principal deputy solicitor general. Hes had twenty or so arguments in the Supreme Court, including part of the Administrations attack on the Defense of Marriage Act last month. Hes been a corporate litigator at OMelveny & Myers; a junior lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor General; and a law clerk to J. Harvie Wilkinson, who is a moderate conservative on the Fourth Circuit, and then to Sandra Day OConnor. He earned degrees from Stanford in college, law school, and even business school; he grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, where his parents taught at the state university.
When Srinivasans name first surfaced as a possible nominee to the federal bench, early in Obamas first term, he drew opposition from labor groups, who appeared to take issue with some of his stands as a private lawyer and in George W. Bushs Justice Department. (He was a career lawyer, not a political appointee, under Bush.) Lately, those objections to Srinivasan have become muted or disappeared altogether. In part, this may be because those kinds of challenges to a nominee are inherently unfair; lawyers, after all, represent clients.
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