President Donald Trump will soon nominate a person to take the place of Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. The president previously released a list of candidates back in November, preceding Kennedy's retirement announcement on Wednesday. After the announcement, Trump that Kennedy's replacement would come from the list, and that the process would "begin immediately." Here's who Trump is considering: 1. Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit 2. Keith Blackwell of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia 3. Charles Canady of Florida, Supreme Court of Florida 4. Steven Colloton of Iowa, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit 5. Allison Eid of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit 6. Britt Grant of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia 7. Raymond Gruender of Missouri, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit 8. Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit 9. Brett Kavanaugh of Maryland, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 10. Raymond Kethledge of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit 11. Joan Larsen of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit 12. Mike Lee of Utah, U.S. senator 13. Thomas Lee of Utah, Supreme Court of Utah 14. Edward Mansfield of Iowa, Supreme Court of Iowa 15. Federico Moreno of Florida, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida 16. Kevin Newsom of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit 17. William Pryor of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit 18. Margaret Ryan of Virginia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces 19. David Stras of Minnesota, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit 20. Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit 21. Amul Thapar of Kentucky, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit 22. Timothy Tymkovich of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit 23. Robert Young of Michigan, Supreme Court of Michigan (retired) 24. Don Willett of Texas, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit 25. Patrick Wyrick of Oklahoma, Supreme Court of Oklahoma<doc-sep>Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit: Hardiman was among those interviewed by Trump last year to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia’s death. He took an unconventional route to the federal bench: He was the first in his family to graduate from college and drove a taxi to help pay for his education. He is a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus and is also reportedly the favorite of Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, with whom he serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. He has previously written two majority opinions — one backing the strengthening of mandatory minimum sentences for criminals, and the other supporting strip-searches — that were reviewed by the Supreme Court.<doc-sep>As soon as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement after 31 years on the Supreme Court, picking his replacement immediately became one of Donald Trump’s most important acts as president. Kennedy is a center-right figure who is solidly conservative on most business and First Amendment cases but strongly pro-gay rights and cautiously supportive of reproductive rights. His replacement is sure to be a more doctrinaire conservative along the lines of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick for the Court. Unusually, Trump has been releasing shortlists of candidates he’d consider for the Court ever since the presidential campaign. His current list, issued in November 2017 in the aftermath of Gorsuch’s appointment, has 25 names. It’s largely a list of solidly conservative options who’d be on most Republican nominees’ shortlists for the Court. Not all 25 are likely to make it very far in Trump’s vetting. Prediction markets can help us winnow down the list. The following nine people are listed on PredictIt as having the best odds of being tapped by Trump to replace the departing Kennedy. They are listed according to their ranking as of Wednesday at 9 pm Eastern. Brett Kavanaugh Current position: Federal appellate judge (DC Circuit Court of Appeals) Why Trump picked him: Brett Kavanaugh has about as long and high-profile a record in Republican legal circles as anyone on this list. A former clerk to Anthony Kennedy, as well as appellate judges Alex Kozinski and Walter Stapleton, he represented Cuban child Elian Gonzalez pro bono during the conservative battle to keep him from returning to Cuba, and was one of the George W. Bush campaign’s lawyers in the Florida recount. Before that, though, Kavanaugh was a protegé of Kenneth Starr, whom he served both in the solicitor general’s office under George H.W. Bush and as independent counsel during the investigation into the Clinton family’s Whitewater real estate deal. He was a principal author of the Starr Report, which detailed Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and misrepresentations of that affair in sworn testimony. “As a prosecutor, Kavanaugh set a bracing literary standard (‘On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts…’),” the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin recalled in 2012, “but his work as a judge may be even more startling.” Toobin cites Kavanaugh’s opinion on the DC Circuit when considering a constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act: [A]ccording to Kavanaugh, even if the Supreme Court upholds the law this spring, a President Santorum, say, could refuse to enforce ACA because he “deems” the law unconstitutional. That, to put the matter plainly, is not how it works. Courts, not Presidents, “deem” laws unconstitutional, or uphold them. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, and that observation, and that case, have served as bedrocks of American constitutional law ever since. Kavanaugh, in his decision, wasn’t interpreting the Constitution; he was pandering to the base. It’s hardly his only stridently conservative opinion on the DC Circuit. In a profile for Ozy, Daniel Malloy notes, “Kavanaugh this year declared that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional, given the agency’s independence and unitary structure, and he has voted repeatedly to slap back aggressive regulations from Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.” At the same time, Kavanaugh knows how to do the DC song and dance of pretending not to believe what he clearly believes on key questions of jurisprudence. He told senators during his confirmation hearings that he’d respect precedent on abortion and declined to share his views on Roe v. Wade. But there’s little doubt that he’d be a doctrinaire conservative on the Supreme Court, and one with a strong belief in presidential power, similar to Samuel Alito. Amy Coney Barrett Current position: Federal appellate judge (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals) Why Trump picked her: Amy Coney Barrett, only 46, is relatively new to the bench; her first appointment came from Trump in 2017. She only got her commission last November. But Clarence Thomas was barely on the circuit court for a year when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, and there’s no reason Barrett couldn’t follow in his footsteps. A clerk to conservative appellate Judge Laurence Silberman as well as Antonin Scalia, and a longtime professor at her alma mater Notre Dame Law School, Barrett’s confirmation hearings earned headlines due to a controversial line of questioning from Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (IL) and Dianne Feinstein (CA), who asked her repeatedly about her Catholic faith. Durbin asked, “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” while Feinstein commented, “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.” Liberal groups, while not defending the precise questioning, highlighted some of her writing on questions of Catholic faith and constitutional interpretation as concerning, noting a piece she co-authored that rejected Justice William Brennan’s argument that Catholic judges should always hold the Constitution as more important than their religious faith. In her confirmation hearing for the Seventh Circuit, Barrett asserted that these were her co-author’s views, not her own. Barrett also argued that the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act impinges on religious liberty, argues that cases like Roe v. Wade might not need to stand as precedents if future courts judge them to be wrongly decided, and has explicitly asserted that the “original public meaning” of the Constitution must be upheld, even though that “adherence to originalism arguably requires, for example, the dismantling of the administrative state, the invalidation of paper money, and the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education.” Barrett was ultimately confirmed with only three Democrats (Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Tim Kaine) voting in favor. But an elevation to the Supreme Court would force a much larger dispute about what, exactly, she believes the original meaning of the Constitution requires. Thomas Hardiman Current position: Federal appellate judge (Third Circuit Court of Appeals) Why Trump picked him: Donald Trump’s been known to say that “the police in our country do not get respect.” That is assuredly not Thomas Hardiman’s fault. On the Third Circuit, Hardiman has consistently sided with law enforcement against defendants and inmates. He ruled that a policy of strip-searching jail inmates didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search (an opinion the Supreme Court upheld). He’s also written, in dissent, that the First Amendment does not give citizens the right to tape police — something with which every state in the union currently disagrees. Hardiman’s pre-judicial career is full of the kinds of things liberals and Democrats don’t like: He donated to Republican candidates before being appointed to the bench (something that is neither illegal nor, to most legal experts, a big deal), and he represented plenty of political clients and political cases while he was in private practice. Most of this is insignificant: Just like it’s a defense lawyer’s job to defend murderers, it’s a civil lawyer’s job to defend companies accused of discrimination. But it’s ironic that one of Hardiman’s most high-profile cases was a housing discrimination suit against a company accused of conspiring to keep out low-income clients — given that the president who might appoint him to the Supreme Court, early in his own career, settled a housing discrimination suit of his own against the federal government. Perhaps most relevant to Hardiman’s chances, though, is that he was reportedly Trump’s second choice after Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia. Despite his conservative record, grassroots right-wing activists freaked out when his name was floated, arguing he could be a stealth liberal. (The evidence for this was shockingly weak.) Perhaps, then, second time’s the charm? Amul Thapar Current position: Federal appellate judge (Sixth Circuit) Why Trump picked him: Amul Thapar was a US attorney turned district court judge appointed by George W. Bush when Trump first floated him as a Supreme Court candidate in September 2016.<doc-sep>
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will choose a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy from two lists of potential nominees that he released during the campaign. During the 2016 campaign, Trump took the unprecedented step of releasing a list of potential nominees to the Supreme Court, a measure designed to reassure conservatives nervous about his ideological bona fides. He later released a second list, which he drew from when choosing Justice Neil Gorsuch. Both lists featured potential nominees who were overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged, typically hailing from red or battleground states in the Midwest, according to an analysis by USA Today. Here’s a look at the 20 remaining names on those lists. 2017’s list of potential nominees Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Keith Blackwell of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia Charles Canady of Florida, Supreme Court of Florida Steven Colloton of Iowa, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Allison Eid of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit Britt Grant of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia Raymond Gruender of Missouri, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit Brett Kavanaugh of Maryland, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Raymond Kethledge of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Joan Larsen of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Mike Lee of Utah, United States Senator Thomas Lee of Utah, Supreme Court of Utah Edward Mansfield of Iowa, Supreme Court of Iowa Federico Moreno of Florida, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Kevin Newsom of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit William Pryor of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Margaret Ryan of Virginia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces David Stras of Minnesota, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Amul Thapar of Kentucky, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Timothy Tymkovich of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit Robert Young of Michigan, Supreme Court of Michigan (Ret.) Don Willett of Texas, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Patrick Wyrick of Oklahoma, Supreme Court of Oklahoma 2016’s list of potential nominees 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 Write to Abby Vesoulis at abby.vesoulis@time.com.