In his New York Times op-ed today (“The Right Has Won the Supreme Court. Now What?”), Michael Tomasky says President Barack Obama in 2016 should have nominated California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar for the U.S. Supreme Court instead of Judge Merrick Garland, whom the Republicans refused to even grant a hearing.
“Mr. Cuéllar would have been an aggressively political choice in exactly the way Mr. Garland was not. As a young, impeccably credentialed Mexican-American — by far the largest of the Latino voting blocs — he would have been someone to whom the Democrats’ core constituencies would have developed an emotional attachment. Someone they’d fight for.”
Tomasky agrees the Republicans wouldn’t have given Justice Cuéllar a hearing, either. “But in that case, the refusal would have carried a higher political price. It would have energized the Latino vote. It would have made the Supreme Court a more central voting issue to Democratic constituencies than poor Mr. Garland ever became.”
