President Obama has begun interviewing candidates for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
NPR, citing sources close to the process, said those being interviewed include Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; Judge Sri Srinivasan, of the same court; Judge Paul Watford, of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco; Judge Jane Kelly, of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals based in St. Louis; and U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who serves in Washington. All of them have been reported previously as potential candidates.
Judges Garland, Srinivasan and Watford are considered leading contenders, NPR said. Attorney General Loretta Lynch took herself out of consideration this week, a Justice Department spokesman said Tuesday.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out Wednesday found that 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Senate Republicans’ plan to block Mr. Obama from replacing Scalia, who died last month at age 79.
The survey, as expected, was sharply divided along party lines, with 69 percent of Republicans approving of keeping the seat open. Nearly eight in 10 Democrats, 79 percent, disapprove of the GOP’s strategy.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have said they won’t hold hearings on any nominee, insisting that the next president in 2017 should choose a candidate to fill the vacancy.
Senator John Cornyn, Texas Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said this week that anybody nominated by Mr. Obama “will bear some resemblance to a piñata.” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Mr. Cornyn “might spend a little too much time watching Donald Trump rallies.”
“Without knowing who this nominee is, without considering what their record is, what their experience is, how qualified they are for the job — he is suggesting that they’ll be subjected to bashing by Republicans,” Mr. Earnest said. “I do think that it is an indication that Republicans are digging in even further in an unreasonable position of not giving that person any sort of fair hearing and, in fact, vowing to try to tear this person down. And he’s doing that even though he doesn’t even know who that person is yet.”
Among the candidates for the nomination, Judge Garland is the oldest at 63. He served as a prosecutor before joining the appeals court in 1997, and became chief judge in 2013.
Judge Srinivasan, 49, served in the solicitor general’s office in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Obama nominated him to the appeals court in 2012, and the Senate confirmed him in 2013 by a vote of 97-0. Born in India, he would be the first Supreme Court nominee of South Asian descent.
Judge Watford, 48, was confirmed by the Senate for the appellate court by a vote of 61-34 vote. If nominated and confirmed, he would be the third African-American to serve on the high court.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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