Ahead and behind in the Merrick Garland debacle

Merrick Garland will not be on the Supreme Court. Garland has resumed participating in cases on the D.C. Circuit (for the past 240 days, he had only been performing his administrative chief-judge tasks) and is scheduled to sit on a panel in mid-January. Some still hold out hope that President Obama will surprise everyone and make a recess appointment on January 3. But as I wrote previously: 1) that is not Obama's style and 2) because the Republican Senate will not affirm the appointment, it would end at the close of the next session of Congress in December 2017, leaving Garland without a job (since he will have given up his D.C. Circuit seat) at only 65 years old, a deal I do not see him taking. We might add as a # 3 that if Obama did this, Congress could enact a law in January declaring the first session of the 115th Congress over immediately, thereby terminating Garland's recess appointment immediately.

For now, I want to consider who within or around the Court comes out ahead and who behind in this debacle.

Obviously, Garland is worst off, as he never will take a seat on the Court despite being as qualified as any recent nominee. The other person who is worse off is Justice Kagan, whose role on the Court has changed, perhaps for the whole of her tenure. She is now the best, most engaging writer on the Court. Given the opportunity to work with a liberal majority with Breyer or Garland as the Court's median, Kagan might have assumed the William Brennan role of the intellectual heart of the liberal majority, crafting doctrine and decisions to hold that majority together and perhaps even appeal to the rest of the Court more broadly. Particularly once Justice Ginsburg left the Court, Kagan might have been the intellectual center of a liberal Court.

The obvious person to come out ahead is whoever Donald Trump puts on the Court, who otherwise would not have gotten there. The other is Chief Justice Roberts. He avoids the prospect of being a Chief regularly in the minority and assigning dissents rather than majority opinions (the scramble to find an historical example of a Chief in that situation landed on Charles Evans Hughes during the New Deal, although he was not a consistent vote in favor of the validity of New Deal legislation). Or the alternative prospect of regularly moderating his own constitutional views to join the majority in order to retain the assignment power.