Donald Trump presents list of potential Supreme Court justices

Donald Trump, the apparent Republican presidential nominee, released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees on Wednesday as part of an effort to quell concerns that he is unfit to select conservative jurists.

The unusual move comes as Trump is looking to unify the Republican Party behind him and win over critics who remain skeptical about the seriousness of his candidacy. While some Republicans who oppose Trump have considered supporting Hillary Clinton or sitting out the election, he has regularly reminded them that the future of the Supreme Court is at stake.

After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February, critics of Trump expressed concern about whether he had the judgment to fill vacancies on the court. He had joked about appointing his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who is a senior judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, before suggesting that he would look for someone in the mold of Scalia and later promising to furnish some prospective candidates.

Trump said in a statement that his short list is “representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value and, as president, I plan to use this list as a guide to nominate our next United States Supreme Court justices.”

The Trump campaign did not share how it settled on the names, but Trump has previously said that he was seeking input from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

Trump’s selections consisted of six federal appeals court judges appointed by President George W. Bush and five state supreme court justices appointed by Republican governors. All are white, and eight of the 11 are men. They include several judges who are regular favorites of conservative legal scholars, including Dianne S. Sykes, a judge on the 7th Circuit who was appointed by Bush and had been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee in his second term. Trump had previously said that he would consider her for a Supreme Court appointment.

Several of the jurists previously clerked for conservative Supreme Court justices after law school. The federal appeals court judges on the list included Steven M. Colloton of the 8th Circuit, a former clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and Raymond M. Kethledge of the 6th Circuit, who clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The state supreme court justices included Joan Larsen of Michigan, a former clerk to Scalia, and Allison H. Eid of Colorado, David Stras of Minnesota and Thomas Rex Lee of Utah, all of whom clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. In addition, Lee’s father, Rex, served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration, and his brother, Sen. Mike Lee, is a Republican senator from Utah.

Another state supreme court justice on the list, Don Willett of Texas, previously worked for the Bush White House’s office of faith-based initiatives and later in Texas government, where he pushed to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments on public property and the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, issues he has promoted on his Facebook page.

Notably, Willett has repeatedly mocked Trump and his presidential aspirations on his Twitter account, including a June 2015 posting in which he wrote: “Donald Trump haiku–Who would the Donald/Name to #SCOTUS? The mind reels./ *weeps–can’t finish tweet*”

Several of the judges on Trump’s list have a history of questioning abortion rights. They included Raymond W. Gruender, a judge on the 8th Circuit who led a majority that permitted South Dakota to enforce a law requiring doctors to tell women that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.”

They also included William H. Pryor Jr. of the 11th Circuit, whose appointment Senate Democrats had tried to block in part because, in his previous role as Alabama attorney general, he denounced Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, as having manufactured “a constitutional right to murder an unborn child.”

Trump’s list also included another federal appeals court judge appointed by Bush, Thomas M. Hardiman of the 3rd Circuit.

The next president could end up having to fill several Supreme Court vacancies, including the one that has been left open by Scalia’s death. Trump has urged the Senate to delay voting on President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill that vacancy, Judge Merrick B. Garland, in hopes that he will have the opportunity to fill the opening.

The initial reaction to the choices was mixed.

Nan Aron, the president of the liberal Alliance for Justice Action Council, deplored Trump’s choice of potential justices as “dangerous,” noting that her group had opposed several of the Bush appointees. Her group had not researched some of the state judges yet, she said.

“The list includes some of the most extreme conservatives on the federal bench today,” she said. “Their opinions demonstrate open hostility to Americans’ rights and liberties, including reproductive justice and environmental, consumer and worker protections. They have ruled consistently in favor of the powerful over everyone else. They would move the needle even further to the right on the Supreme Court.”

Ed Whelan, a former clerk to Scalia and a prominent conservative legal commentator, praised several of the names on the list but reserved judgment about whether conservatives should trust Trump to follow through on what he says he will do.

“It’s a good list of some of the outstanding judges who give ample sign of being faithful to the Constitution,” Whelan said. “Whether a President Trump could actually counted on to pick folks like this is a different question.”

Some of Trump’s most vocal conservative critics remained doubtful despite the credentials of the judges on the list. Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger who has been working to derail his campaign, insisted that Trump still could not be trusted with the court.

“Like every clause of every sentence uttered in every breath Donald Trump takes, this is all subject to change,” Erickson said. “He will waffle, he will backtrack, and he simply cannot be believed.”

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Donald Trump presents list of potential Supreme Court justices."