President Bush may well have an opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court. Here are some of the most talked-about candidates:
• Alberto R. Gonzales, Washington, President Bush’s White House counsel, 47. The second of eight children of uneducated Mexican-American immigrant parents, he was raised in Texas in a house without hot water or a phone. He enlisted in the Air Force after high school, won an invitation to the Air Force Academy, and eventually graduated from Rice University and Harvard Law School. He rose to become the first Hispanic partner at Vinson & Elkins, a large Houston-based law firm. He became then-Gov. Bush’s legal counsel in 1995. He was appointed by Bush in 1997 to be Texas secretary of state, in 1999 to be on the Texas Supreme Court, and in 2001 to be White House counsel. In that position, he has pushed Bush’s broad claims of presidential power-especially to fight terrorism, by overriding civil liberties when necessary-and governmental secrecy. Liberals will find new ammunition in a recent Atlantic Monthly article surveying 57 confidential memoranda that Gonzales prepared for then-Gov. Bush summarizing the clemency petitions of death row inmates, often hours before their executions. The article concluded that not one of these Gonzales memos "summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant’s best argument in a case involving serious questions of innocence or due process."
Pluses: He is Mexican-American, at a time when Bush could court Hispanic-American votes by appointing the Court’s first Hispanic justice, and he is a trusted, level-headed adviser to and personal favorite of the president. Minuses: Some conservatives are deeply concerned that he will be too centrist for their taste, especially on the hot-button issues of abortion and affirmative action.
• J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Charlottesville, Va., U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, 58. He served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a law professor, a newspaper editor, and the head of the Reagan Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before Reagan put him on the 4th Circuit in 1984. He has written a book criticizing racial preferences as "the most dangerous of policy prescriptions for a multi-ethnic nation." In a recent speech titled "Why Conservative Jurisprudence Is Compassionate," he argued that modesty is the highest virtue for a judge. Pluses: His first-rate legal mind, and soft-spoken, courtly, collegial manner-reminiscent of the moderate Powell, his role model-might make it hard for liberal opponents to demonize him as they did Robert H. Bork. Minuses: Democrats see him as a conservative activist. At the same time, some conservatives consider him less principled and more political than his colleague J. Michael Luttig.
• J. Michael Luttig, Alexandria, Va., U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, 49. After clerkships with then-Judge Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, he held some important Justice Department positions before President George H.W. Bush appointed him in 1991 to the 4th Circuit, which he and Wilkinson have helped to make the most conservative of the 12 regional federal courts of appeals. His judicial opinions are often logical tours de force that methodically shred the reasoning of adversaries. He was touched by tragedy in 1994, when his father was murdered in front of his mother, in a carjacking in Tyler, Texas. Pluses: He is a potent intellect, an extremely hard worker, and a perfectionist with an agreeable personality. Many conservatives revere him as closer than anyone else to being an intellectual clone of their hero, Scalia. Minuses: Democrats see him as a judicial "Antichrist," as one admirer puts it, who seeks to lead a constitutional counterrevolution. Some Wilkinson admirers, on the other hand, trash Luttig as a self-promoter and suspect his motivations for skewering Wilkinson in several opinions. With a round, boyish face that makes him look younger than he is, Luttig fits the chief-justice image less well than does Wilkinson.
• Samuel A. Alito Jr., Newark, N.J., U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, 53. President George H.W. Bush appointed him to the 3rd Circuit in 1990 after he had worked as a federal prosecutor, assistant solicitor general, deputy assistant attorney general, and U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Pluses: His exceptionally sharp intellect and consistently conservative jurisprudence earn him the admiration of many in the Bush camp. Minuses: Liberals have signaled their intention to fight any Alito nomination, calling him "Scalito" because his jurisprudence resembles that of Scalia, although he is more mild-mannered on the bench and less flamboyant.
• Janice Rogers Brown, Sacramento, Calif., California Supreme Court, 54. The daughter of an Alabama sharecropper who later joined the Air Force and moved his family to California, Brown put herself through California State University (Sacramento) and UCLA School of Law. She worked in the state attorney general’s office, and became legal affairs secretary in 1991 for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who put her on an intermediate appellate court in 1995. The next year, she became the first African-American woman to sit on the California Supreme Court. She is an outspoken and at times acerbic conservative who dissented forcefully from a decision to strike down a California law that required minors to obtain parental consent for abortions. She has upheld California’s Proposition 209, outlawing use of racial preferences by the state, and has accused her colleagues of having "an overactive lawmaking gland." But she has voted with liberals in some decisions upholding criminal defendants’ rights. Pluses: She is a smart, eloquent, independent-minded African-American. Minuses: Her sharp rhetoric sometimes offends colleagues.
• Emilio M. Garza, San Antonio, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, 55. He was appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court and elevated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. A former marine, corporate litigator, and Texas state judge, he was considered for the Supreme Court in 1991 before Bush chose Clarence Thomas. Pluses: He is a Mexican-American judge from Bush’s home state, and is respected by conservatives for his judicial philosophy, meticulousness in following the law, and ability. Minuses: Liberals would target him as almost a sure vote to overrule Roe v. Wade, based on two judicial opinions in which he reluctantly followed Supreme Court abortion precedents but stressed that the justices had been wrong to find a right to abortion in the Constitution and that the states should be free to regulate or ban it.
• Edith H. Jones, Houston, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, 54. She was with a large Houston law firm and did a short stint as the general counsel for the Texas Republican Party before President Reagan appointed her to the 5th Circuit in 1985. She was a finalist for the 1990 nomination that went to then-Judge David H. Souter. Pluses: Conservatives see her as part of their movement. Minuses: Liberals see her as a hard-hearted hard-liner with no compassion for downtrodden people.
• Larry D. Thompson, deputy attorney general, 57. A former U.S. attorney for Georgia, litigator with King & Spalding, and close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas, Thompson has been a trenchant critic of racial preferences. He was said by some to favor a tougher position against such preferences than the White House was willing to take in the enormously important pending case involving racial affirmative-action preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan and its law school. Pluses: Thompson is a respected African-American without a revealing paper trail for Democrats to attack. Minuses: Liberals may assume he’s another archconservative Clarence Thomas unless he testifies otherwise.