President Donald Trump will announce his nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement in primetime on Monday. He started with a list of 25 potential nominees, but has since narrowed it down to four finalists: Brett Kavanaugh, Raymond Kethledge, Thomas Hardiman, and Amy Coney Barrett. Reports have surfaced that Kavanaugh and Hardiman were the final two finalists, but the nation won't officially know until Trump makes his big announcement at 9 p.m. ET. All four nominees are current federal appeals court judges and are all under the age of 55, meaning they would have the opportunity to shape the nation's highest court for decades to come. Here's what you need to know about the backgrounds and legal careers of the final four:<doc-sep>President Donald Trump is set to announce his nominee for Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court Monday evening at 9 pm, and by many accounts, a frontrunner for the position is Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge Thomas Hardiman. Widely viewed as the runner-up to replace Antonin Scalia last year, Hardiman, 53, has been a Trump favorite for a while, but has picked up steam in recent days. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recommended Hardiman, along with Sixth Circuit judge Raymond Kethledge, to Trump, saying that the two would face fewer obstacles to confirmation than Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh, two other finalists. A report by New York Times’s Maggie Haberman suggested that Trump spent Monday morning “seeking input” from various sources about Hardiman and Kavanaugh; the other rumored finalists, Barrett and Raymond Kethledge, “were not the focus of Mr. Trump’s morning discussions, according to those familiar with the discussions.” Hardiman has a long and solidly conservative record as a federal judge, both in his current post and in his prior role on a district court. His past nominations have been approved without controversy. He was twice appointed by George W. Bush, and the Senate confirmed him 95-0 for his court of appeals job, with 18 current Democratic senators including Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, and Bernie Sanders voting yes. If appointed and confirmed this time around, he will be the only Supreme Court justice to not have attended Harvard or Yale for law school. He went to Georgetown Law Center, which bizarre as it may seem adds a bit of diversity of background to the Court. He was the first in his family to go to college, turning down a Harvard scholarship to attend Notre Dame, paying his way by working as a taxi driver. Hardiman also comes highly recommended by an important person in Trump’s orbit: his sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, a colleague of Hardiman’s on the Third Circuit. The prospect that Hardiman will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and thus that his replacement of Kennedy will end the constitutional right to abortion in America, hangs over a possible confirmation battle. Pro-abortion rights Republican senators, notably Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, will be under considerable pressure both from their co-partisans (to back the pick) and by abortion rights groups, who are sure to oppose him vigorously. The fact that Trump (acting on the advice of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo) is considering him strongly suggests that Hardiman is anti-Roe, although Leo told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Hardiman is “a little bit less known by conservatives” and his “record … a little bit lighter” than Barrett or Kavanaugh. But besides being on Trump’s shortlist, Hardiman has not left many clues as to his views on abortion and hasn’t ruled on it during his time on the Third Circuit. That’s helped stoke conservative worries that Hardiman would be a “stealth nominee,” in the mold of former justice David Souter, a Republican choice without a sufficient background record who could become a moderate or even liberal if picked for the Court. How Hardiman ruled as an appellate judge As SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe and Vox’s Dara Lind have noted, Hardiman’s rulings in his 10 years on the appeals court bench are reliably conservative, and particularly so on matters of crime and punishment. He has repeatedly ruled against death row inmates, joined an opinion upholding Delaware's protocol for lethal injections, ruled that strip-searching jail inmates is acceptable under the Fourth Amendment, and concluded that the First Amendment doesn't give citizens the right to videotape police officers, a position which, if applied nationally, could make it much harder to hold officers accountable for police brutality. He is a consistent supporter of gun rights, writing a dissenting opinion arguing the Court should have struck down on Second Amendment grounds a New Jersey law limiting handgun carry permits to people showing a “justifiable need” to carry handguns in public. He also sided with two plaintiffs challenging a federal law banning felons and some misdemeanants from owning guns; he did not argue that the whole law was unconstitutional, but contended that because the two plaintiffs were only convicted of nonviolent misdemeanors (corrupting a minor and carrying a handgun without a permit, respectively), a ban that applies to them overly burdens Second Amendment rights. Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and expert on Second Amendment issues, has described Hardiman as a “Second Amendment extremist” who would vote to strike down gun control laws in states like California and New York if put on the Supreme Court. He has a mixed record on the First Amendment, but it's mixed in a way that should be amenable to conservatives. He sided with an anti-abortion protester who was convicted of violating the terms of a permit and interfering with agency function after he refused orders from park rangers to leave a sidewalk in front of the Liberty Bell Center. And he dissented to side with a mother and son who had been barred from reading from the Bible in a kindergarten "show and tell" session, arguing that barring religious texts infringed on free speech and religious liberty rights. He wrote an opinion striking down a Philadelphia charter provision barring donations from police officers to the police union’s PAC. While pro-union, the implication of this ruling is that he’s sympathetic to First Amendment challenges to campaign finance regulation, like Citizens United. On the other side, he sided against the NAACP in a case where it tried to place an ad criticizing mass incarceration in the Philadelphia airport, writing, “I view the City’s restriction a reasonable attempt to avoid controversy at the airport.” He dissented in a case involving a middle school that banned breast cancer awareness bracelets reading, "I ♥ boobies! (KEEP A BREAST)"; the Court ruled that the middle schoolers had a First Amendment right to wear the bracelets, whereas Hardiman wrote in dissent that "the Majority’s approach vindicates any speech cloaked in a political or social message even if a reasonable observer could deem it lewd, vulgar, indecent, or plainly offensive." Some GOP activists are still concerned But despite rulings like those, Hardiman has prompted concern among a number of conservative activists who worry he could be a moderate or liberal in disguise, starting in 2017 when he was floated as a contender for Scalia’s seat: They better be prepared to lose even more of their base if they make a David Souter 2.0 pick like Hardiman because of Trump's liberal sister https://t.co/Maillzsrhi — Jeff B/DDHQ (@EsotericCD) January 29, 2017 Why do I get the feeling Hardiman is going to be a Roberts or Souter instead of an Alito or Scalia? https://t.co/pb4p8E9Ojd — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) January 29, 2017 For one thing, there’s Hardiman’s reported backer, Maryanne Trump Barry. Barry has fairly strong Republican bona fides. She was first appointed to a district court by Ronald Reagan, and then picked for the Third Circuit by Bill Clinton as an attempt to balance out some Democrats he was appointing. Matthew Stiegler, who runs the Third Circuit–focused blog CA3, has described her as a “moderate-conservative Republican centrist.” But a lot of conservative activists hate Barry, mostly for a 2000 ruling she made overturning New Jersey’s ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. Barry argued that the ban was unconstitutionally vague, potentially encompassing many other types of abortion clearly protected under Roe. The decision also came down shortly after Stenberg v. Carhart, a Supreme Court case striking down a nearly identical Nebraska law. For that reason, even Samuel Alito, then on the Third Circuit, concurred in Barry’s judgment. That said, because Barry argued in her opinion that the ban was arbitrary for its focus on cases where fetuses are partially outside the uterus, many anti-abortion advocates attacked her for, in the words of Ramesh Ponnuru, “beginning to rationalize a constitutional right to commit and procure infanticide.” It makes sense that anyone Barry endorses might, from the perspective of someone who thinks of her as an infanticide apologist, be suspect by extension. The influential pseudonymous conservative blogger Allahpundit, in an otherwise quite positive piece on Trump's shortlist, flagged as concerning this quote from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile of Hardiman: Richard Heppner Jr., who went to Harvard Law, served as one of four law clerks for Judge Hardiman in 2010. The one-year appointment, he said, was a great experience. “Every day, there was thoughtful, careful attention to the law and arguments,” he said. The judge, he continued, was conscientious and strove to get the law right, while adhering to the Constitution and precedent. Although Judge Hardiman tends toward conservative values, Mr. Heppner said, those don’t color his work on the court. “I don’t think he really has set ideas about particular hot-button issues that would lead him to pre-judge a case that came before him,” he said. “True, you don’t want a justice ‘prejudging’ cases,” Allahpundit wrote. “But after the psychological scarring Republicans have suffered from William Brennan and David Souter (and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Kennedy), the idea of a Court nominee who doesn’t have ‘set ideas about particular hot-button issues’ makes me nervous.” There are a handful of Hardiman decisions, flagged by SCOTUSblog’s Howe, that defy conservative orthodoxy by siding with claims of discrimination from marginalized groups. He wrote an opinion allowing a gender stereotyping claim from a self-described "effeminate" gay man, concluding that he was "harassed because he did not conform to [his employer’s] vision of how a man should look, speak, and act.” He ruled in favor of African-American firefighters challenging a fire department’s residency requirement, on the grounds that it was a form of discrimination against black firefighters not living in the overwhelmingly white area served by the fire department. He noted that while only 3.4 percent of the population covered by the department is black, 0.62 percent of the firefighting force is, concluding, "minority workforce representation that low suggests discrimination." He’s also ruled in favor of a Honduran asylum seeker fleeing gang violence, a decision that has earned him the enmity of the pro-Trump white supremacist site VDARE. Finally, the Judicial Common Space score, an influential measure of judicial ideology, places Hardiman somewhere to the left of John Roberts and only slightly to the right of Kennedy: that is, right in the middle of the Court. Why the Hardiman = Souter arguments don’t make a ton of sense Cards on the table: I don’t think conservatives have much to worry about with Hardiman. Basically all the evidence marshaled against him is weak. Take the Judicial Common Space score graphed above. The score attempts to infer the ideology of appellate judges from their appointing president and their two home-state senators, relying on the tradition of “senatorial courtesy” in which the Senate refuses to confirm nominees opposed by senators from their home state (and in which the White House usually consults those senators before making an appointment). Hardiman’s home-state senators were Arlen Specter (then a moderate Republican, soon to become a moderate Democrat) and Bob Casey (an anti-abortion but otherwise liberal Democrat). So it’s unsurprising that given their scores, he’d wind up appearing pretty moderate. But the score doesn’t rely at all on how Hardiman actually voted as a judge. That limits its effectiveness as a metric. The Maryanne Trump Barry issue is pure Kremlinological speculation. Whatever you think about her abortion jurisprudence, the idea that she’s pushing Hardiman as part of a secret, shadowy plot to spring a pro-abortion rights justice on her brother seems very far-fetched, especially compared with the more sensible inference that she worked with him for years and respects him as a colleague, and so thinks he’s worthy of a promotion. As National Review’s Ed Whelan — a leading judicial conservative and Hardiman supporter — notes, Barry testified to the Senate in support of the nomination of her colleague Alito, who proved to be a consistent social conservative once confirmed. “If you are alarmed,” Whelan writes, “I suppose that you also would have been suspicious of this fellow named Antonin Scalia, whom President Carter’s liberal White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, testified in favor of at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1986.”<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — With the debate over the next Supreme Court justice set to intensify after President Donald Trump announces his nominee Monday, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Sunday he believes any of the president's apparent finalists would be able to muster the majority needed to be confirmed by the Unites States Senate. “I think we can confirm any of the four names being mentioned,” Blunt said. “I think they’re good judges. I think they would be fine justices on the Supreme Court. I do think the president has to think about who would be the easiest to get confirmed here.” Republicans maintain a razor-thin margin in the Senate, especially if Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is unable to vote on the nominee due to his battle with cancer. If the White House does not get the support of any Democrats, the GOP would need all of its remaining 50 votes to confirm the nominee. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., implored Democrats to “really take this seriously,” imploring his colleagues to understand “it’s a historic decision. It will decide the future of this court for a generation or more.” Several Democratic senators are facing tough re-election bids in red states where then-candidate Trump handily won in 2016. Three of those Democrats voted to confirm Trump's last nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch. Durbin, the minority whip, said that nomination should be instructive for Democrats. “Neil Gorsuch, chosen by the Federalist Society as well, has gone to the bench, is voting in lockstep on the Republican, conservative side, and they want to fill this vacancy to give them an advantage in future rulings,” he said. Durbin would not commit to pressing forward with a strategy of calling on Senate Republicans to delay the confirmation process until after the midterm elections, but said he personally asked McConnell whether he would follow the precedent he established in 2016 after the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia that February before the election. McConnell held up the nomination of President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, for nearly a year, citing, at the time, that voters should decide the fate of the Supreme Court in that fall’s election. “Now [McConnell is] saying we’ve got to hurry through here and get this done before the election. Totally inconsistent,” Durbin said on Sunday. “He’s either wrong the first time or wrong the second time. The net result is he’s trying to play to his political advantage.”