President Obama has already nominated two minority women. Judge Garland is in the Court of Appeals, DC Circuit. He could step into the job and immediately render opinion. He is more then qualified.
Chief Judge Garland (click here) has published in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, taught at Harvard Law School, and served as President of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
He is amply qualified.
The "Thurmond Rule" is an illegitimate reason to oppose the nominate of Chief Judge Garland.
Confirmations (click here) in the four most recent presidential election years, especially for district nominees, have been more robust than most formulations of the Thurmond rule would have predicted. Those experiences, though, may have little predictive value for 2012. The shifting landscape of judicial nominations and confirmations, as described in January, makes it risky to look to the past to predict how the increasingly contentious confirmation battles will play out in 2012. Being a “consensus nominee” may have been a ticket to confirmation in earlier years, but it’s difficult even to define the term in 2012, when nominees with little if any opposition still have a hard time getting floor votes. And Republican senators’ objections to the president’s January recess appointments to some executive branch positions may also affect the judicial confirmation process....
