63 years old. Harvard law grad. Longtime judge. Current Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
This is just some of what we know about Merrick Garland, President Obama's choice to fill the open Supreme Court seat, vacated when Justice Antonin Scalia died earlier this year.
He's commonly regarded as a centrist who has earned plenty of plaudits from those on the right. In fact, as recently as Sunday he was lauded by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is still a member.
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"[Obama] could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man," he told Newsmax, a conservative news site. "He probably won't do that because this appointment is about the election," he added. "So I'm pretty sure he'll name someone the (liberal Democratic base) wants."
Hatch may have made such a comment as a way to both dare Obama to nominate a jurist palatable to Republicans, but that doesn't mean he and other Republicans won't continue to insist that the next Supreme Court justice be selected by the next president, even if they don't have major bones to pick with Garland ideologically.
A look at how Garland has ruled on employer and business-related issues shows, however, that he has certainly ruled against business interests in some cases that might irritate Republicans.
In a 2010 article describing Garland's legal record, Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUS Blog, an authoritative source on the high court, pointed out that Garland is typically deferential to federal agencies in lawsuits brought by employers challenging federal rules.
In FedEx v. NLRB, for instance, Garland voted to uphold a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board's forcing FedEx to bargain with the Teamsters union that sought to represent many of its employees. Garland was in the minority, however, and the court ruled in favor of FedEx's positions that its workers were independent contractors, and thus could not collectively bargain.
In another labor case, Northeast Bev. Corp v. NLRB, Garland again sided with the NLRB, which had found that a spontaneous walkout by employees to participate in union activities during work hours was a "protected action" and that the discipline imposed on the employees by the employer was illegal. The court, however, sided with the business.
In a notable health care decision, Appalachian Regional Health Care v. Shalala, Garland sided with the Clinton administration's decision to reduce Medicare reimbursements to a provider that had found a cheaper way to provide certain medical services.
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