I understand Fredrick Douglass is very popular with Trump. It’s a pick everyone can agree on!
Manchin will block the nominee, so this doesn’t really matter. Even if he doesn’t, this merely replaces a liberal vote with another, so it doesn’t change the balance.
Any other members expected to retire soon (of course any could have sudden health problems or die)?
Apologies to all. I messed up merging @DavidNRockies’ new topic into this existing one. I think I’ve fixed it now. This is the existing topic going forward. Again, sorry for the disruption – learning as I go.
for those that don’t know Taft was chief justice of SC after he was president.
With Breyer retiring, the next oldest is Clarence Thomas, who has been on the court for 31 years, and is now 73 year old; Samuel Alito is the next oldest, at 71.
I don’t picture Thomas willingly retiring until there’s a clear path to a Republican-nominated replacement making it onto the Court.
Also, I should note that, as far as I know, Thomas doesn’t have any significant health issues at this point.
I strongly suspect this is the route McConnel will take. Why would he want to go to the wall to oppose one liberal justice being replaced by another? This is the perfect opportunity to show how all this talk about Republican intransigence and the politicization of the Supreme Court is overblown. It also lets him save up his ammunition should a conservative justice unexpectedly resign (or more likely die) while Biden’s President, which he will fight tooth-and-nail to keep Biden from filling.
Manchin has voted for every Biden nominee that has come up for a vote. Bernie Sanders can’t claim the same. And Manchin voted for often-mentioned candidate for an SC opening Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson when she was confirmed to the DC circuit last year.
I think all you’ve said is how this will unfold. Sinema is far more likely to be the fly in Biden’s ointment when voting on a nominee.
Now that Biden’s president, he gets to say what the Biden rule is.
McConnell can’t stop it. There’s no filibuster on SC nominees anymore.
I’ve thought for a while that Obama would make a good SC justice. There’s precedent–Taft was a Justice after his presidential term, and, from what I understand, was happier in and better-suited to that role than he’d ever been as President.
I understand that, but my point is that there are degrees of opposition. Like @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper, I think McConnell is likely to be more solicitous of moving the nomination forward in an expeditious manner and keeping the hearings from being a circus than he would have been if it was a conservative justice being replaced. Because he’ll use that to swat away arguments that Republicans are obstructionist on judges.
I will say that while I think McConnell will want to take that approach, it’ll be interesting to see how many members of his caucus he can get to limit their intransigence. A Supreme Court nomination is a prime time opportunity for Republicans to beat their chests and show their base how they’re fighting Biden’s socialist agenda. I imagine a lot will depend on how Trump responds.
I have no objection to a Justice Obama (although I don’t think it will happen, for a lot of reasons) but one difference is Taft was a state trial court judge and Federal appeals court judge earlier in his career, as well as Solicitor General. So, it’s not like he just went from POTUS to SCOTUS without any judicial experience.
Biden will keep his promise to appoint an African American woman, so it won’t be Obama. I doubt Obama would even want to be on the Court as it is currently arrayed.
Biden has said that he will appoint an African American woman to his first Supreme Court opening. It would be politically perilous for him to back off that promise.
edit: ninjaed by @Aspenglow
McConnell: “Of course I’m happy for President Biden to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. Just not this one.” Lather, rinse, repeat for two years; then switch to, “in two years, Biden has not found a suitable replacement to fill this shameful vacancy on our Supreme Court. Now that we’re less than a year from electing a new president, perhaps we should hold off until the American people have their say.”
He could still nominate Obama and keep that promise.
Malia or Sasha? 
And it would be one thing if the Chief Justice position was open (like with Taft), but there’s no way he’d go for being an associate justice.
I was thinking Michelle.
And in reality, she’d probably make a better Scotus than Barack.