Washington – President Bush appears ready to announce a new Supreme Court nomination today, moving quickly to put forward a replacement for the ill-fated choice of Harriet Miers and hoping to recapture political momentum, said Republicans close to the White House.
Judging by the names the White House floated by political allies in recent days, Bush seems ready to pick a candidate with a long track record of conservative jurisprudence – one who would mollify the Republican base, whose opposition to Miers’ nomination helped scuttle it. Several GOP strategists said the most likely choice seemed to be federal appeals Judge Samuel Alito, with Judges Michael Luttig and Alice Batchelder also in the running.
Any of the three would draw support from many conservative activists, lawyers and columnists who vigorously attacked Miers as an underqualified presidential crony. At the same time, the choice would have years of court rulings that liberals could use in opposition.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Sunday he already has warned the White House that nominating Alito – who is often compared to Justice Antonin Scalia – would “create a lot of problems.”
Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., seemed to suggest the president was not getting good advice on his first nominee.
“You should always be looking for … new blood, … new people in administration. … You’ve got to reach out and bring in more advice and counsel,” Lott said on “Fox News Sunday.” “… Maybe there wasn’t enough consultation … (on Miers). But he will deal with that problem, and he’ll do it next week.”
Republican lawmakers and strategists said a swift nomination with a consolidated party behind him would represent an important first step for the president to pull himself out of a political ditch.
With the withdrawal Thursday of Miers’ nomination, the mounting death toll in Iraq and the indictment Friday of top vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Bush has hit an all-time low in public-approval ratings and wants to start a new chapter in his troubled second term.
Bush spent the weekend at Camp David huddled with Miers, who remains his White House counsel and is therefore in charge of the judicial selection process, along with Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who originally advocated Miers. As the three talked, White House officials contacted prominent conservatives to test the reaction to various candidates.
One group consulted by was the Concerned Women of America, whose decision to oppose Miers last Wednesday became one of the final blows to help kill the nomination. Janet LaRue, the group’s chief counsel, said her organization received a call from the White House on Saturday and liked what it heard.
“Alito and Luttig have always been at the top of our list,” she said. “We think either of them would be a supreme pick. There isn’t a thing stealthy about them. They’ve got a long, proven record of constitutional conservatism.”
Alito, Luttig and Batchelder were all appointed by President George H.W. Bush 14 to 15 years ago.
Alito, 55, who studied at Princeton and Yale, has sat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit based in Philadelphia since 1990. Nicknamed “Scalito” by some who compare him to Scalia, the high court’s prime conservative intellectual force, Alito built a record as an incisive skeptic of liberal constitutional theory. He voted to uphold a Pennsylvania law that required a woman to notify her husband before an abortion – a law rejected by the Supreme Court.
Luttig, 51, a graduate of Washington and Lee and the University of Virginia, has been a conservative mainstay of the 4th Circuit appeals court based in Richmond, Va., since 1991. Like Alito, he is known for his sharp intellect and occasional skirmishes with fellow conservatives. He wrote a ruling striking down part of the Violence Against Women Act that allowed women to sue attackers, sided with the government in terrorist-detention cases and upheld a Virginia law restricting so- called partial-birth abortions that was later struck down by the Supreme Court.
Batchelder, 61, another University of Virginia law graduate, has served on the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit since 1991 after six years as a district judge. She voted to uphold Ohio’s partial-birth abortion ban and against the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action program.
The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
Top candidates
Speculation on President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee centers on three federal appeals-court judges:
Samuel A. Alito: 3rd U.S. Circuit; often compared to Justice Antonin Scalia
Alice Batchelder: 6th U.S. Circuit; like the others, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush
J. Michael Luttig: 4th U.S. Circuit; one-time Scalia clerk
