Anthony Kennedy is retiring from the Supreme Court

When news broke that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the longest-serving liberal justice on the Supreme Court, had died, it became clear almost immediately that President Trump would try to replace her with a conservative justice before the presidential election on November 3. It also became clear that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader who famously blocked President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year in the name of letting the people choose, would work with Trump to push through the nominee ASAP.

The brazenness of the move, along with the prospect of a Supreme Court with six conservative justices, almost immediately sparked a liberal response in the form of calls for court-packing.

As of Friday afternoon, Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, has the votes in the US Senate to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

The confirmation was supposed to be a straightforward affair. Kavanaugh, 53, is a candidate straight out of Supreme Court central casting: He went to Yale and Yale Law; he clerked for two federal appellate judges; worked in the solicitor general’s office in the George H.W. Bush administration; and then clerked for Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

With Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announcing her support for him, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court is now all but assured.

He will be replacing Anthony Kennedy, who was, since at least 2005, the swing vote on many of the Court’s most ideologically charged decisions, responsible for 5-4 rulings that legalized same-sex marriage, preserved Roe v. Wade, upheld warrantless wiretapping, blew up campaign finance restrictions, overturned DC’s handgun ban, and weakened the Voting Rights Act. That position made him one of the most powerful people in America for well over a decade, not even counting the 18 years he shared his position as the Court’s swing voter with Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh September 20. Barring any delays — a sexual misconduct allegation from his teenage years is the latest scandal to hit Kavanaugh’s nomination — he could be confirmed to the Supreme Court in the next month.

Kavanaugh would replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy — and the Court will almost certainly drift further to the right. For decades, Kennedy represented what scholars call the “median justice,” which gave him the swing vote in several decisions that split along ideological lines.

This week’s confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been met with mourning from supporters of reproductive rights and the dignity of women more generally. Should Kavanaugh be successfully confirmed, the majority of justices could favor the recriminalization of abortion at some point when the Court resumes again.

I’m a historian who studies the history of reproductive rights in the US. To envision what our future holds should Roe v. Wade be successfully overturned is not hard — we only need to look to the decades before the nationwide legalization of abortion to get a sense for how the status of women could radically change.

President Donald Trump announced on Monday night that Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, is his choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. With the announcement of Kennedy’s retirement and now Kavanaugh’s nomination, abortion rights watchers have been sounding the alarm that Roe v. Wade, the nation’s landmark 1973 abortion rights decision, is in a fragile state.

Over his three-decade tenure, Kennedy has been the swing vote keeping federal abortion rights mostly intact. And if the right case makes it to the Supreme Court, the Trump-nominated replacement to Kennedy and four other dependably conservative justices could overturn Roe v. Wade and jeopardize legal abortions in the United States.

President Donald Trump has chosen his nominee for Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court: DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh, 53, is a candidate straight out of Supreme Court central casting: He went to Yale and Yale Law (every current justice either attended that school or Harvard Law); he clerked for two federal appellate judges, including the well-known Alex Kozinski; worked in the solicitor general’s office in the George H.W. Bush administration; and then clerked for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Since 2006, he has sat on the DC Circuit, which also produced current justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the looming battle resulting from President Donald Trump’s pick of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court, there’s a big question: Can Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer keep his Democratic caucus united to vote against the new nominee?

Republicans don’t need Democratic votes to confirm Kavanaugh, but they will matter if any Republican senators defect. (The Republican senators to watch here are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.)

President Donald Trump announced Monday night he has nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the US Supreme Court.

Trump’s pick came from a short list of federal appeals court judges, all with staunch conservative credentials. Now Kavanaugh will face a tense confirmation hearing in the US Senate.

President Donald Trump is set to announce his nominee to fill the vacant seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy at 9 pm Eastern time on Monday, July 9. It will be broadcast on multiple networks, including ABC, CBS, and CNN, and you can watch a live stream on C-SPAN.

There’s a chance he’ll tweet it out first, but thus far, he’s held off.

President Donald Trump is set to announce his nominee for Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court Monday evening at 9 pm, and by many accounts, a frontrunner for the position is Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge Thomas Hardiman.

Widely viewed as the runner-up to replace Antonin Scalia last year, Hardiman, 53, has been a Trump favorite for a while, but has picked up steam in recent days. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recommended Hardiman, along with Sixth Circuit judge Raymond Kethledge, to Trump, saying that the two would face fewer obstacles to confirmation than Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh, two other finalists. A report by New York Times’s Maggie Haberman suggested that Trump spent Monday morning “seeking input” from various sources about Hardiman and Kavanaugh; the other rumored finalists, Barrett and Raymond Kethledge, “were not the focus of Mr. Trump’s morning discussions, according to those familiar with the discussions.”

Tonight, at 9 pm Eastern, President Donald Trump will announce his pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Will it be Brett Kavanaugh, beloved by establishment Republicans for his rulings against the Affordable Care Act? Amy Coney Barrett, whose Catholic faith and uncompromising social conservatism have made her a favorite among Christian conservatives? Raymond Kethledge, an outdoorsman who managed to charm Trump in his interview?

Which judge Trump chooses is less meaningful than the fact that Trump is choosing a second justice at all. The first seat Trump filled opened under Barack Obama, but Senate Republicans refused to consider any replacements, hoping to win the 2016 election and see the seat filled by a Republican. Mitch McConnell’s bet paid off: Trump did win that election, though he lost the popular vote decisively, and Neil Gorsuch was named to the Court.

President Donald Trump plans to announce his pick for the Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on Monday, July 9, at 9 pm Eastern time.

Unless he just tweets it out before then — something Axios reports he’s considering.

No matter who Donald Trump picks to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, the nation’s high court is going to move to the right on a lot of issues — chief among them abortion rights, which Kennedy largely affirmed during his time on the Court. How far right will be up to Chief Justice John Roberts, who many are calling the Court’s new swing vote.

The data bears it out: FiveThirtyEight calculated that, safely assuming Trump picks a new justice who is more conservative than George W. Bush nominee Roberts (and all the shortlisted justices are), then the chief justice will be the new median judge on the Court — becoming the fifth vote in those narrow 5-4 decisions.

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy — along with the series of conservative decisions that he joined at the end of the Supreme Court term preceding his retirement —make this a deeply depressing time for liberal jurisprudence. The travel-ban decision may have been bad, in short, but worse may be yet to come.

But this term also provided a ray of light amidst the darkness: Justice Sonia Sotomayor emerged as a uniquely effective member of the Court.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has laid out a plan for Democrats to thwart President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick. They’re facing an uphill battle when it comes to wrangling votes, so the strategy boils down to winning the narrative.

As part of this approach, Schumer’s aiming to leverage flashpoint issues like abortion and health care to gin up public pressure on some of the lawmakers who sit a bit closer to the center, a tactic he outlined in a New York Times op-ed. “I’d like to see massive marches and rallies and protests,” he said during a recent town hall teleconference, per WNYC.

“What do you think of New York Times v. Sullivan?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked me only a few minutes into my clerkship interview with him.

Just getting the interview seemed itself a tremendous accomplishment. Most other justices selected potential clerks and brought them in straightaway for interviews. Justice Kennedy, by contrast, put clerkship candidates through two rounds of screening interviews with former law clerks. Only when the screeners had approved a candidate could he or she advance to an interview with the justice himself.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy — who announced his retirement last week — was often called one of the most powerful people in America.

He was a Reagan appointee and generally on the right, but he did break from the Court’s conservatives on some key issues. For decades, he occupied a middle position on the Court, with four of his colleagues on either side of him — a position scholars have dubbed the “median justice.”

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement has spurred a raft of questions about how key legal precedents could shift under the tenure of a likely more conservative replacement — and chief among these is the fate of Roe v. Wade.

The landmark 1973 case that guaranteed women’s legal right to an abortion has been on conservatives’ target list for some time, and although Kennedy was appointed by a Republican president, he frequently sided with the liberal wing of the court and acted as a swing vote on cases preserving abortion rights.

President Donald Trump gets to pick another Supreme Court justice now that Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring — but you’ll have to wait until July 9 to find out who it is.

Trump told reporters Friday that he’s narrowed his list down to five people, including two women. He will start interviewing some candidates as early as this weekend, possibly at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to relive “the old days” of summoning potential Cabinet picks.

An overwhelming proportion of Americans oppose rolling back Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The poll — which was conducted prior to the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement — found that about two-thirds of Americans do not think Roe v. Wade should be overturned, with roughly the same percentage of men and women expressing this viewpoint. The results are a bit more stratified along party lines, with 81 percent of Democrats agreeing that the decision should stay intact, while just 43 percent of Republicans do.

One of the most underappreciated reasons that Donald Trump won the 2016 election was voters motivated by a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

One in five voters told CNN in an exit poll that the Supreme Court was one reason they had cast a ballot. Of the voters who said it was the “most important factor” in their decision, 56 percent voted for Trump. According to the Washington Post, 26 percent of all Trump voters polled said that the Supreme Court was the basis of their decision.

48 years ago, Sarah Weddington, then a 25-year-old attorney who had only worked on a few uncontested divorce cases, took on a pro-bono case involving a young Texas woman’s unsuccessful attempt to legally obtain an abortion. Weddington would go on to argue the case, Roe vs. Wade, in front of the Supreme Court and change the course of American history.

Three years later in 1973, Roe v. Wade, decided 7-2, legalized abortion in many circumstances nationally. For many Americans, it represented a bold step forward toward reproductive rights and women’s rights.

Though he sided with conservatives on most issues, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy sometimes broke ranks when it came to the environment. Kennedy, who announced Wednesday he will step down in July, was the key swing vote on one of the most important climate policies the United States has enacted: the regulation of greenhouse gases.

The 2007 Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency decision forced the EPA to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. After a review of the science, the EPA issued an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases in 2009, which says carbon emissions are a threat to public health.

Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, in 2016 so voters could have a voice in the process, they said.

Now, months away from another nationwide election that could fundamentally reshape the political power dynamics in Washington, Republicans have a vacant Supreme Court seat that they are eager to fill with a conservative Trump nominee — elections be damned. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he expects to confirm a replacement for the Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is retiring in July, by this fall.