Srikanth "Sri" Srinivasan, U.S. Court of Appeals judge on the D.C. Circuit.
Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The 48-year-old circuit judge would be the first SCOTUS justice of Indian descent — he was born in Chandigarh and moved with his family to Kansas when he was a child. Srinivasan earned his bachelor's degree at Stanford, going on to graduate from the university's law and business schools; he then became a law clerk for both U.S. Court of Appeals' Fourth Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson III and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Srinivasan was later a partner in the law offices of O'Melveny & Myers and, while George W. Bush was in office, assistant to the solicitor general. Notably, he served as deputy solicitor general for the Obama administration before receiving his nomination to the D.C. Circuit (for which the Senate then voted in his favor, 97-0) in 2012. His "experience on the other side of the aisle," according to CNN, makes him a likely choice for a contentious position.
And, as Toobin pointed out, he's made "twenty or so arguments in the Supreme Court," helping to take down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. While Obama's past two terms have taught us that a Republican Senate can and will block basically anything on the basis that the president proposed it, the thinking behind a Srinivasan nomination is that it would prove palatable enough to conservatives — who, remember, did unanimously confirm his D.C. Circuit nomination in 2013 — that they might accept it.
For his part, Srinivasan doesn't believe that a majority Obama-appointed bench affects the court's ruling — at least, it hasn't in his circuit court.
"If we lived in a world where we had the rule of a judge, rather than the rule of law, you would have seen an absolute sea change, an avulsive change in the law as it was interpreted, applied and rendered by our court," he said, according to Politico.
But we live in a world regulated by the rule of law, so if a judge is doing their job, their personal politics shouldn't decide the outcome of a case.
http://news.yahoo.com/sri-srinivasan-meet-dc-circuit-181900528.html
Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The 48-year-old circuit judge would be the first SCOTUS justice of Indian descent — he was born in Chandigarh and moved with his family to Kansas when he was a child. Srinivasan earned his bachelor's degree at Stanford, going on to graduate from the university's law and business schools; he then became a law clerk for both U.S. Court of Appeals' Fourth Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson III and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Srinivasan was later a partner in the law offices of O'Melveny & Myers and, while George W. Bush was in office, assistant to the solicitor general. Notably, he served as deputy solicitor general for the Obama administration before receiving his nomination to the D.C. Circuit (for which the Senate then voted in his favor, 97-0) in 2012. His "experience on the other side of the aisle," according to CNN, makes him a likely choice for a contentious position.
And, as Toobin pointed out, he's made "twenty or so arguments in the Supreme Court," helping to take down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. While Obama's past two terms have taught us that a Republican Senate can and will block basically anything on the basis that the president proposed it, the thinking behind a Srinivasan nomination is that it would prove palatable enough to conservatives — who, remember, did unanimously confirm his D.C. Circuit nomination in 2013 — that they might accept it.
For his part, Srinivasan doesn't believe that a majority Obama-appointed bench affects the court's ruling — at least, it hasn't in his circuit court.
"If we lived in a world where we had the rule of a judge, rather than the rule of law, you would have seen an absolute sea change, an avulsive change in the law as it was interpreted, applied and rendered by our court," he said, according to Politico.
But we live in a world regulated by the rule of law, so if a judge is doing their job, their personal politics shouldn't decide the outcome of a case.
http://news.yahoo.com/sri-srinivasan-meet-dc-circuit-181900528.html
