SCOTUS Roundup: A closer look at Granholm, Sotomayor

Not too much going on in the discussion of who President Obama will selected to replace retiring Justice David Souter this Tuesday, so let’s take a look at a few other handy resources.

(Just to cover the bases, though: Chris Cillizza reported yesterday that Stephanie Cutter will help shepherd the nominee through the confirmation process for the White House and the New York Times reported that Senate Republicans are lowering expectations of a confirmation fight.)

Here’s a little background on Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D), who many believe is on Obama’s shortlist. Granholm is also in D.C. on Tuesday for Obama’s CAFE standard announcement and possibly to talk with Obama about the Supreme Court? Who knows.

We aren’t doing this as it’s own post because Granholm doesn’t have much of a paper trail when it comes to her legal views. She has never been a judge or a legal scholar.

Granholm, who was born in Vancouver, would be the first non-U.S. born Supreme Court Justice since Felix Frankfurter, who was Austrian. She went to Berkeley undergrad, then Harvard Law. She clerked for U.S. Appeals Court Judge Damon Keith and, in 1990, became an assistant U.S. attorney for Eastern Michigan.

Seems to me that, from a political point of view, Granholm’s biggest plus is she would satisfy those who think Obama should pick a woman in a big way. Granholm was Michigan’s first woman attorney general and the state’s first woman governor.

Granholm has also focused primarily on environmental issues and “has championed universal access to higher education” in her second term as governor, according to her website – two areas that could come before the court in the future.

Meanwhile, Todd Goldstein over at the SCOTUS blog is doing what we non-lawyers in the media cannot (or, at least, have not): He is providing in depth research on Sonia Sotomayor’s previous rulings. Goldstein evidently directed a group of summer associates at his firm last year in studying Sotomayor’s rulings (great foresight!) and is revealing what they found in four blog posts, of which two are up already. Notably, Goldstein concludes that Sotomayor has similar legal views as Souter.

The whole thing is worth reading and is a tremendous resource. In particular, Goldstein provides an in depth explanation of the ruling that conservative groups, like the Judicial Confirmation Network, are using against her.

Goldstein writes:

Perhaps the highest-profile discrimination case in which Sotomayor has participated (though she did not write a signed opinion) is Ricci v. DeStefano, a challenge by a group of white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut to the city