Supreme Court nominee should have ‘life experience,’ Obama says

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he was seeking a Supreme Court nominee with “life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom,” reaffirming his intent to fill the court’s vacancy in the coming weeks in the face of increasingly broad Republican resistance.

In a post on Scotusblog, a site that covers the high court, Obama offered no specifics about his much-speculated-upon shortlist of candidates, giving only what he called “spoiler-free insights” into how he was choosing a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia.

The candidate would be “eminently qualified,” Obama wrote, and someone who “recognizes the limits of the judiciary’s role,” without an ideological agenda. The president also said he would select a jurist who had more than just a theoretical grasp of legal principles.

“There will be cases in which a judge’s analysis necessarily will be shaped by his or her own perspective, ethics, and judgment,” Obama wrote, adding that he was seeking someone with “a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook.”

”It’s the kind of life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times,” the president wrote.

Obama made no mention of the bitter partisan battle that has emerged around the Supreme Court vacancy, which took a remarkable turn Tuesday when Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee said that they would not even meet the president’s eventual nominee and that they had no intention of holding confirmation hearings before the next president takes office in January.

“As senators prepare to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to consider the person I appoint, I hope they'll move quickly to debate and then confirm this nominee so that the court can continue to serve the American people at full strength,” Obama wrote.

This story was originally published February 24, 2016 at 11:13 AM with the headline "Supreme Court nominee should have ‘life experience,’ Obama says."