WASHINGTON — Save for his age, Judge Merrick Garland seems to fit the mold for a contemporary Supreme Court nominee.
Garland, who is married to a fellow Harvard College graduate and is the father of two daughters who attended Yale, mirrors a high court on which every justice attended an Ivy League university either as an undergraduate or for law school.
The outdoors-loving, 63-year-old Illinois native has been a lifelong high achiever, epitomized early on by his selection as a National Merit Scholar when he was in high school in Skokie. Like four of the high court’s current justices, he’s a Harvard Law School graduate. Like three of them, he once clerked at the court. He’s Jewish, as are three of the court’s four Democratic nominees; the remainder of the court is Roman Catholic.
And, like all of his potential future colleagues, Garland lacks any direct experience with elected office, though that could have turned out otherwise.
“I come from the land of Lincoln … and so my first desire was, maybe I thought I’d like to be a politician like Abraham Lincoln,” Garland told a law school panel two years ago.
Garland has even known the friction from political tug-of-war, something he’ll feel again as President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Senate Republicans made Garland wait 18 months before confirming him to his current job.
But Garland is a distinct choice, in several ways. As chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, on which he has served since 1997, Garland would bring to the Supreme Court a remarkably long record on the bench.
“He has more judicial experience than any nominee since Oliver Wendell Holmes,” said White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston.
Holmes was 61 when appointed in 1902; he went on to serve for more than 29 years.
Garland is also older than any of the current justices were when they were nominated; six of them were in their 40s or 50s when tapped for the court. While Garland has been considered for past Supreme Court openings, his selection now bends the general rule that presidents favor younger nominees who can shape the law for decades to come.
As a white man, moreover, Garland’s selection surprises those who thought Obama would explicitly rally certain constituencies with an ethnic minority or female candidate. Instead, Garland’s selection puts Republicans in a different kind of bind, as seven still-sitting GOP senators previously voted for him.
“His intelligence and his scholarship cannot be questioned,” Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch said during Senate debate on March 19, 1997, adding that “his legal experience is equally impressive.”
A former Justice Department official, Garland oversaw the prosecution of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bombing cases in the 1990s, saying Wednesday that the latter work showed him “the devastation that can happen when someone abandons the justice system.”
Appointed by President Bill Clinton and eventually confirmed by the Senate on a 76-23 vote, Garland has amassed what in some ways is a centrist record, sympathetic to law-and-order causes.
“Garland is a moderate, careful jurist with a broad, bipartisan array of admirers,” said Deborah Pearlstein, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. “He’s unassailably qualified, and at the same time a strategically clever choice.”
In recent months, for instance, he has written opinions upholding a Federal Election Commission complaint against former Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig. He has on multiple occasions rejected habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo Bay detainees, and he joined a unanimous three-judge panel that rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for the Osama bin Laden death photos.