Court Nominee

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's search for a Supreme Court nominee has been narrowed to two or three choices, sources say.Mr. Clinton is reportedly looking closely at U.S. Appeals Judge Stephen G. Breyer of Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Jose A. Cabranes of Connecticut and federal Appeals Judge Jon O. Newman of Hartford, Conn. A White House official said last night that Mr. Clinton is expected to announce his decision next week.The politically beleaguered president reportedly is eyeing Judge Breyer because the Boston judge would have widespread Senate support in both parties, a source said.

Remember the "Gang of 14"? That was the bipartisan group of senators who six years ago agreed not to filibuster judicial nominees except under "extraordinary circumstances. " Well, looks like some people have decided to redefine "extraordinary" to include "politically convenient. " Surely that's the only way to explain Tuesday's filibuster of Caitlin Halligan, who was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The insufficient 54 to 45 vote end cut off debate included a yea from just one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

WASHINGTON -- Republican and Democratic senators called on President Bush yesterday to release documents relating to Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers' service as White House counsel, with some warning that she may not win confirmation otherwise. In discussions on television talk shows, senators of both parties said that the biggest obstacle to Miers' confirmation is a lack of information about her capabilities. Sen. Sam Brownback, ordinarily a Bush ally but also a social conservative who is expected to seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, warned that the Senate "is not a rubber stamp."

With her confirmation by the Senate as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan becomes only the fourth woman ever to serve on the nation's highest court. At 50, the former Harvard Law School dean and Obama administration solicitor general can look forward to decades on the bench, where we hope she'll be a moderating force on a court that, like the Senate that confirmed her 63-to-37, has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Justice Kagan's swearing-in Saturday marks the first time that three female justices will sit on the court concurrently, and she brings impeccable credentials and a wealth of experience to the job, though she has never served as a judge.

Washington-- She was white. He was black. She was tall. He, not so tall. Her family had a winter home in Florida. His family, not even a working toilet.But as they walked down the long corridor of her former law school in Omaha, Neb., hand-in-hand like an unmatched pair of bookends, professor Richard Shugrue saw only a perfectly suited set."This is my fiance," Virginia Lamp said, introducing Clarence Thomas to her former Creighton University law professor."I thought, 'This is absolutely perfect!

WASHINGTON -- By the time President Clinton finally pick Bruce E. Babbitt for the Supreme Court -- if, in fact, he does -- the nominee just might have a public image that his own family would not recognize.And if Mr. Clinton decides not to nominate Mr. Babbitt, onereason could be the president's unwillingness to fight over that image.Either way, Mr. Babbitt could conclude that he had been "Borked."The word is not in the new 10th edition of "Webster's Collegiate Dictionary," just out last month, but it will be in the next edition of National Textbook Co.'s "Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions," according to that book's author and now the company's dictionary director, Richard A. Spears.

WASHINGTON -- Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reaching the end of the public inquiry into her legal views, denounced discriminatory treatment of homosexuals yesterday but refused to say what she thinks about any constitutional protection for them.The constitutional issue, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "is a burning question at this very moment . . . and is going to be before the court" -- an obvious reference to the legal battle over President Clinton's new policy on gays in the military services.

WASHINGTON -- If there is a sure winner in the cases decided by Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., it is freedom of religion - any religion. During his 15 years as an appellate judge, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee has written decisions in favor of Muslim police officers in Newark, N.J., who wore beards, an American Indian from Pennsylvania who raised sacred black bears, and a Jewish professor who said she was pushed out of her job for refusing to...

WASHINGTON -- Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. pledged to keep an "open mind" on abortion-rights cases and denied that he has any judicial agenda to restrict abortions, as he navigated carefully yesterday through a minefield of questions from senators weighing his confirmation. During a marathon session on Capitol Hill, Alito declined repeatedly to detail his views on such issues as whether the Constitution protects abortion rights or President Bush had the power to authorize domestic spying by the National Security Agency without warrants.

The first press release from Colorado Springs came within hours. While television was airing the initial images of Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., the powerful Christian resource center Focus on the Family flashed an e-mail to reporters signaling founder James C. Dobson's satisfaction. "We are extremely pleased," said Dobson, considered one of the most influential evangelical leaders in the country. Within a day, he was calling on his radio listeners to contact their senators; cassettes and CDs of the broadcast were listed for sale on the Focus on the Family Web site.

As the Senate moves toward a confirmation vote on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the only question is how many Republican senators will support her. Will it be more than the nine who voted for Justice Sonia Sotomayor? Fewer? And what will that say about her qualities as a justice? Unfortunately, the answer will probably be: not much. Ms. Kagan followed closely the script laid out by Chief Justice John Roberts in what is widely considered a masterful performance in his confirmation hearings five years ago, repeating the phrases "settled law" and "judicial restraint" as often as possible.

Of all the things in the hundreds of thousands of pages of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's paper trail, the one she may regret the most when her Senate confirmation hearing opens today is a 1995 University of Chicago Law Review article about the very process she's about to undergo. She argued that high court confirmation hearings had become useless "lovefests" between question-dodging nominees and compliant senators. The hearings revealed "far too little" about the nominees' views about the law and the constitution, she wrote.

Dear President Obama, Thank you so much for orchestrating the outpouring of support for your Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, from Marylanders who wrote some two dozen letters to the editor of The Sun this weekend urging her swift confirmation. Although each of the letters is different, the identical formatting of the names and addresses of the letter writers and the repetition of certain salient points leaves us little doubt that we are in the midst of another attempt by Organizing for America, your political organization, to demonstrate to us that our readers support your efforts, much as it did during the debate over health care reform.

WASHINGTON - -The near-party line vote Tuesday to approve Judge Sonia Sotomayor in the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a message that Supreme Court nominees cannot be assured of winning support in the Senate even if they have solid legal credentials and a moderate record. It also sent a warning that a more liberal nominee from President Barack Obama could provoke an all-out confirmation battle in the Senate. By a 13-6 vote, the Democrats and a lone Republican sent her nomination to the full Senate, where she is expected to win confirmation next week.

Despite all the buildup and anticipation on Capitol Hill leading to last week's confirmation hearings, the Senate Judiciary Committee's 15 hours of grilling Judge Sonia Sotomayor produced a week of tedium and polite reticence. The only fireworks were contained within the soliloquies of senators fervently expressing their own views of legal issues but rarely revealing the Supreme Court nominee's. If the advise and consent function of the Senate took a turn too far toward spectacle, partisanship and electronic inquisition with the nomination of Robert H. Bork two decades ago, it has turned into something altogether different - and perhaps just as problematic - for so many of the nominations since then.

WASHINGTON - - In a possible preview of the debate over President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, the nominations of U.S. District Judge Andre Davis of Baltimore to the Court of Appeals and state Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to head the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department were cleared Thursday for confirmation by the full Senate. The Senate Judiciary committee, which will hold confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor later this summer, approved Davis and Perez on bipartisan votes of 16-3 and 17-2, respectively.

Just because Fred Thompson has been squiring the new Supreme Court nominee around Capitol Hill doesn't mean he has given up greasepaint. Thompson, a Republican Party stalwart and U.S. senator from 1994 to 2003, is serving as an informal adviser to John G. Roberts Jr., the judge chosen last week by President Bush to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. But while tutoring Roberts on the finer points of Senate relations, Thompson, 62, will have to squirrel away some time to memorize lines.

WASHINGTON -- This is just what President Bush was hoping to avoid. With senators home for the holidays and Bush's Supreme Court pick, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., biding his time until next month's hearings, opponents are using the lull to try to sway the public, and the Senate, to kill the nomination. The tactics are creating a headache for the White House and the conservative groups supporting Alito, who are countering a drumbeat of criticism by Democrats and liberal groups with a campaign to burnish the appellate court judge's reputation and convince the public that he is a mainstream jurist.

For weeks, it's been obvious Republicans would oppose whoever President Barack Obama picked to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Conservative commentators pounced on the president's use of the word "empathy" to describe one of the qualities he was looking for - as if an ability to put oneself in another person's shoes was somehow undesirable in a judge - and that same sort of reflexive hostility was on view again over the weekend, when a top Senate Republican threatened to filibuster Mr. Obama's choice without even knowing who it was. But with the nomination Tuesday of Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge in New York who would become only the third woman and the first Hispanic ever to serve on the nation's highest court, we hope even the president's critics will give his candidate a fair hearing.

WASHINGTON - - President Barack Obama decided Tuesday to send to the Supreme Court a veteran federal judge from New York whose humble upbringing and moderate-to-liberal record on the bench is not likely to trigger a "culture wars" battle in the Senate. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, 54, who would be the first Hispanic justice on the high court, has not ruled squarely on controversies such as abortion or gay rights, and legal experts say her narrowly written opinions resemble those of the justice she would replace, David Souter.