Donald's shortlist is apparently down to three: Thomas Hardiman, William Pryor, Neil Gorsuch.
Hardiman is about as hardline pro-police anti-suspect as you could ask for, so he's my current bet for the nomination, since the "Law and Order" president might consider getting favorable rulings on police and court procedure cases a priority. Emphasis on might.
On the Third Circuit, Hardiman has consistently sided with law enforcement against defendants and inmates. He ruled that a policy of strip-searching jail inmates didn't violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search (an opinion the Supreme Court upheld). He's also written, in dissent, that the First Amendment does not give citizens the right to tape police — something with which every state in the union currently disagrees.
Pryor, I imagine, would be the darling of this forum. You want a firebrand conservative justice? He's your man. Called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law."
He also, as attorney general of Alabama, wrote an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws banning sodomy and, in the words of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), "equated private, consensual sexual activity between homosexuals to prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and pedophilia."
Neil Gorsuch might as well be a vat-grown Scalia clone. So, a "safe" option, I guess.
I'd say the Democrats should force the Republicans to finally nuke the filibuster and get it over with, but of course it looks like they're going to capitulate and let any nomination through without much of a fuss for the sake of "bipartisan compromise".
"Old World Blues.' It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can't see the present, much less the future, for what it is. They stare into the what-was...as the realities of their world continue on around them." -Fallout New Vegas
