If Kavanaugh Doesn’t Make It, Who’s Next?

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Amy Coney Barrett sits on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Chicago. Having never held judicial office before — she clerked for Scalia and later taught at Notre Dame — she was confirmed to her current post by the Senate less than a year ago, by a relatively tight 55-43 vote. Before that vote, Barrett had a run-in with Sen. Dianne Feinstein about Barrett’s Catholic religious beliefs. “The conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said. “And that’s a concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years.” Feinstein was talking about Roe v. Wade. Some have suggested that it “would’ve been a helluva lot harder for the left to demonize a woman” than it has been for them to mount an attack on Kavanaugh.

Thomas Hardiman sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Philadelphia. If you recognize his name, it’s because he’s appeared on lists like this before, having come up frequently in conversation for both Scalia’s vacant seat and Kennedy’s. (Perhaps a third time would be the charm.) He could have a populist appeal that Kavanaugh might lack: He was the first in his family to finish college, and he paid for law school by working as a cabdriver. SCOTUSblog describes him as a supporter of the death penalty and no sympathizer to free speech claims; The Washington Post called him a “Second Amendment extremist.” He was appointed to his current position by George W. Bush in 2007 — he was unanimously confirmed.

There are others beyond those three, as well. Trump’s judicial bench is deep — and deeply conservative, assembled from a roster blessed by the Federalist Society, the prominent conservative legal group. If Kavanaugh remains the nominee, that tells us more about the politics in the air than the singularity of his conservatism.

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