Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor by Joan Biskupic

Author:Joan Biskupic [Biskupic, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Legal, Nonfiction, Supreme Court
ISBN: 9780374712419
Google: xHxzAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

The President’s Choice

A few weeks after Barack Obama’s November 2008 presidential election, he huddled with legal advisers in his Chicago transition office to thrash out priorities. The Supreme Court came up almost immediately. Obama believed he would have at least two opportunities to make nominations. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens—two Republican appointees who had moved to the liberal camp over time—appeared likely to step down during the next four years.

Obama knew that his lawyers were gathering names of potential nominees for all levels of the federal bench, but the president-elect wanted to make sure three names were definitely on the Supreme Court list: Diane Wood, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and an Obama teaching colleague from the University of Chicago; Cass Sunstein, a former professor at the University of Chicago who had just taken a position at Harvard Law School; and Elena Kagan, another former University of Chicago professor, who had become dean of the Harvard Law School. As Obama mused about other possibilities, he mentioned Sonia Sotomayor. “Clearly, she has to be in the mix,” Obama said, according to Gregory Craig, who became the White House counsel.1 Obama understood the potential historic and political benefits of naming the first Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court.

As a former law professor at the University of Chicago who had written about the “high wire” thrill of teaching students the Constitution, Obama also understood the sheer magnitude of a Court appointment. In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, he extolled the individual liberties enshrined in the Constitution and said, “We would be hard pressed to find a conservative or liberal in America today, whether Republican or Democrat, academic or layman” who did not embrace the constitutional values espoused by the High Court.2 Yet he knew that appointments to the bench were polarizing affairs, where the past was prelude. Obama observed that “each side has claimed incremental advances … and setbacks.” In the latter category, he noted that conservatives lamented the leftward drift of David Souter, an appointee of President George H. W. Bush.3

* * *

Two decades earlier, the reserved, bookish Souter had come to the White House’s attention through his connections with Republican U.S. senator Warren Rudman and White House chief of staff John Sununu, natives of New Hampshire who had previously worked with him. Souter had been state attorney general and a state court justice. In early 1990 Bush named him to the Boston-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and then tapped him in August 1990 to succeed the retiring Supreme Court justice William Brennan. Sununu promised Republicans that the relatively obscure Souter would be a “home run for conservatives,” but this prediction could not have been more wrong. Souter ended up being one of the liberal members of the Court during the late 1990s and the 2000s, which prompted a “no more Souters” mantra among conservatives.

And almost immediately after the 2008 election, Souter was ready to give the new Democratic president an opportunity for a Supreme Court appointment.

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