Potential Democrat Court Nominees

If anything should energize Republicans to vote, it's the prospect of Democrats nominating Supreme Court nominees, and Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog has a not so short list of potential nominees.

Goldstein's list is interesting for what it tends to focus on: age (between 50 and 60), demographics (no white guys need apply), experience (litigation specialists need not apply), and ideology (no nutroots). It's an interesting criteria designed to gather liberals who aren't too liberal in a day and age where such information would be all over the internet five minutes after the nomination was made public.

Most interesting to me was the age issue. Obviously, Democrats are taking a page out of the Republican playbook of nominating young candidate who would have decades to shape the law of the land. As Goldstein points out, this is a more daunting task for a Democrat president because it has been so long since there was a Democrat in the White House to appoint judges.

The other interesting aspect of Goldstein's list is the color/diversity/gender problem. Because Democrats tend to be so much more concerned about what a person looks like, it limits their ability to nominate white males who might actually advance their agenda. Surely, the first nominee of a Democrat president will be a woman and some sort of minority (perhaps a Hispanic woman? Who knows?). All Goldstein's top picks are female and three of the four are Hispanic (one is black). I suppose when you are most interested in what someone looks like, ideology comes second.