WH: Election Year Politics Not A Factor In Kagan Pick
Since President Reagan took office in 1981, 12 seats on the United States Supreme Court have become open. Until this year, only four of those openings occurred in an election year. Yet despite an increasingly contentious environment and the strong likelihood that Democrats will lose seats after elections this fall, White House officials today said that political circumstances played no role in President Obama's choice of Solicitor General Elena Kagan.
"The president came at this process with an appreciation for what a historic choice and responsibility picking a Supreme Court justice is, and I think he picked the person he thought would make the best justice for the Supreme Court. He did that without regard to the number of Democrats we have in the Senate, without regard to the fact that this is an Election Year, without regard to any of those extraneous factors," Ron Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, told RCP at a briefing this morning.
Leading up to today's announcement there had been speculation that the president, aware that his 59-seat Senate majority is unlikely to last, might favor a potentially contentious candidate from the short list now and save a more centrist choice, like Merrick Garland, for the future when that majority is narrower. But press secretary Robert Gibbs spoke of the folly of that line of thinking.
"My guess is every administration walks out of here with a file of who they were going to nominate next, and never got the opportunity to nominate that person," he said. "You can be too cute by half trying to narrowcast and look ahead. I would reiterate what Ron said - this is about picking the best person at that time and not with a lot of moving chess pieces."
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