Supreme Court Vacancy: Obama Invites GOP to White House Meeting

In the faint hope of making some bipartisan headway, President Barack Obama invited two top Senate Republicans to join him and Democratic leaders at the White House next week to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy opened up by the impending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens.

The White House said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) would sit down on April 21 with the president, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.).

Republican leaders have reacted cautiously to the Stevens vacancy, saying, in effect, they prefer that Obama not name someone who is very liberal. "I hope President Obama will nominate his successor from the middle and not from the fringe," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) in a comment typical of the response from the Republican side.

Leahy called the White House meeting "an important step in the process of confirming the next Supreme Court justice." Sessions, a staunch conservative, is the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, which must recommend a nominee for confirmation by the full Senate. Democrats want that Senate confirmation vote before the start of the high court's fall term -- and they hope to avoid a Republican filibuster.

The short list for the Stevens vacancy is said to include appellate judges Diane Wood of Chicago, and Merrick Garland of Washington, U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is the former governor of Arizona.

How Obama will measure the liberalism of a nominee is to be determined. But it is worth noting that not everyone counted Stevens as a great liberal, though he usually sided with the court's four-member minority in decisions written by the five more conservative justices. "Justice Stevens' 'legacy' will likely be framed by his independence -- not only of politics, but of opinion-writing, behavior, and more generally in style of judging," said Robert Bennett, law professor at the Northwestern University School of Law, Stevens' alma mater. "And while the overall complexion of his jurisprudence was 'liberal,' he was quite capable of breaking the mold."