With the announcement scheduled for Monday, there are three finalists to replace Justice Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court and President Donald Trump has narrowed the field down from 30 to three. Of course, President Trump could head to twitter and make the announcement at any time.
All three have conservative street cred and we have two men and a woman on the final group. So here according to Fox News are the top three candidates in no order.
George W. Bush appointee, Brett Kavanaugh who is currently a Federal appellate judge at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. That is considered the prime spot for those who one wants to be Supreme Court Justices.
Kavanaugh has about as long and high-profile a record in Republican legal circles as anyone on this list. He is a favorite of the man who would replace, Judge Anthony Kennedy, who clerked for.
He was a protegé of former Clinton special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whom he served both in the solicitor general’s office under George H.W. Bush and as independent counsel during the investigation. He was a principal author of the Starr Report, which detailed Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and misrepresentations of that affair in sworn testimony.
Amy Coney Barrett who at present serving as an Federal appellate judge (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
She is only 46, is relatively new to the bench; her first appointment came from Trump in 2017. She only got her commission last November. That said Clarence Thomas was only on the circuit court for a year when he got the call to join the Supreme Court. So, Barrett could jump to the head of the class with a good final interview.
As a law professor at Notre Dame she was a member of a Catholic revivalist group called “People of Praise,” in which members swear an oath of loyalty and give each other input on personal life decisions. Her stance on abortion has the GOP happy and the Democrats worried.
Some court-watchers are concerned that Barrett has been too explicit on abortion to be confirmable. But others speculate that overturning Roe v. Wade might be less galvanizing to progressives if a woman casts the decisive fifth vote.
Raymond Kethledge who at present is a Federal appellate judge (Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
So of his rulings resonate with President Trump starting with his ruling in 2014, when he wrote an opinion upholding the use of credit checks to screen potential employees at Kaplan, a for-profit education firm, defending the company from an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit. The opinion noted, pointedly, that use of credit checks was permitted by the EEOC’s own hiring guidelines — an act of gotcha jiujitsu that was praised by the Wall Street Journal.
