Obama's Senate calls: Specter, Hatch

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama reached out by telephone today to a couple of senators with seats on the Judiciary Committee who will consider his nominee for the Supreme Court.

"Following through on his commitment to reach out to Democrats and Republicans in the Senate,'' the White House said, the president called Sens. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and Arlen Specter, the newly minted Democrat from Pennsylvania. Obama "vowed to consult regularly with senators in both parties to ensure an orderly confirmation process that will allow Justice Souter's replacement to be confirmed by the beginning of the court's next session'' in October.

If the senators are telling the president the same thing they're saying in public, this might offer a hint of what the president heard on the other end of the phone:

"He should be looking for someone with a strong academic and professional background. It would be my hope that he would choose someone with diversity,'' Specter said Sunday on NBC News' Meet the Press. "Women are under-represented on the Court. We don't have an Hispanic, African-Americans are under- represented. I would hope that he would look beyond the circuit courts of appeals, which now populate the Supreme Court and pick someone with greater world experience and diversity...

"Maybe not a politician, perhaps a statesman or a stateswoman,'' Specter said. "But all of the justices now have been on the circuit courts of appeals, and they have lives and experiences, which are all very similar. And we live in a very diverse country with a lot of different interests, and I think it's important to have an Hispanic on the court at some point; important to have more than just one woman on the court, and more than one African-American, and it would be good to get people who know something besides wearing a black robe.

"We look to the court to interpret the Constitution and the statutes passed by Congress and not to make laws,'' Specter said. "There is no doubt that the standards and values in our country have shifted. As Cardozo said in the Palco case years ago, there was a time when equal protection meant that the Senate galleries were segregated, and we know how foolish that would be in modern-day life. So there is no doubt that there are changes with the times. But if you talk about empathy, you may be talking about something, which is broader.

"But we'll have to test the nominee on that.

"Listen, the job of the United States Senate is to ask firm, really tough questions to find out whether the nominee has an open mind, whether the nominee respects the supremacy of the Constitution, whether the nominee will look to Congress to establish public policy, and there are going to be some empathetic factors, but basically we are a nation with a rule of law,'' the Pennsylvanian said.

Hatch, however, had a pretty good idea of what the president was talking about in his desire for an "empathetic'' judge.

"Usually those are code words for an activist judge... who is going to be partisan on the bench,'' Hatch said on ABC's This Week. "We all know he's going to pick a more liberal justice.... A pro-abortion justice - I don't think anybody has any illusions about that.''

One conservative group has begun mobilizing against some of those whom Obama is believed to be considering: appeals court judges Sonia Sotomayor of New York and Diane Wood of Chicago, and the new solicitor general, Elena Kagan. In some circles, This Week's George Stephanopoulos noted, they are being called radicals.

"I don't think they're radicals," Hatch said, "but there's no question that they are on the far left of the spectrum.

"And to be honest with you, I don't expect the president to pick somebody in the center or on the far right. But, you know, it would be a slam dunk if he picked somebody who was center-left like Souter. Souter became very liberal, but he also stood for a lot of principles."