For the time being, liberal groups are unified behind the campaign to get Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a confirmation hearing.

But if the nomination fight spills into next year, and a new president, it’s clear many will push for someone more liberal.


Bernie Sanders said Thursday that should he win the White House in November, he would ask President Barack Obama to withdraw Garland’s nomination so a President Sanders would be able to choose someone more in line with the senator’s progressive viewpoints. Still, though, Sanders stressed that he’s “100 percent prepared” to confirm Garland.

On Friday, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — which has not endorsed in the presidential race but has aligned itself with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party — said they agreed with Sanders’ move and that Clinton should do the same.

"If a Merrick Garland nomination makes sense at all, which is disputable, it only makes sense at this exact moment in time,” PCCC co-founder Adam Green said in an email Friday. “It would be nonsensical for a new Democratic president to nominate him and equally nonsensical to pass Garland in a lame-duck Congress if a Democrat wins the White House.”

With Republicans flatly refusing to even hold hearings on Garland’s nomination, it'll be essentially impossible to confirm him before the election. But if a Democrat wins the presidential race, there’s a very remote possibility that Republicans could choose to advance Garland in the lame duck, rather than deal with a pick from Sanders or Hillary Clinton. And many on the left would have preferred Obama to nominate someone with deeper progressive bona fides — for all Garland’s qualifications, he doesn’t seem to be the kind of groundbreaking choice that would stoke liberal passions.

To underscore that point, Democracy for America Executive Director Charles Chamberlain said Clinton or Sanders "should nominate a better candidate. They should nominate somebody that is a stronger progressive."

For now, Senate Democrats are squarely focused on promoting Garland and wearing down Republicans so they agree to hold a confirmation hearing and vote this year. They’re not willing to entertain questions about future nominees or lame-duck scenarios.

“I’m not even getting into that,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the chief messaging brain for Senate Democrats, said in an interview with POLITICO this week. “I want Garland to be chosen this year, and I think the chances are better than people think.”

Yet, it’s a question that Democrats could very well confront in the coming months, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the vast majority of his 54-member conference stick by their vow to deny Garland a confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee. Some Senate Republicans have already started to acknowledge that a potential President Hillary Clinton could nominate someone considerably more liberal and younger than the 63-year-old Garland.

In that scenario, some progressive groups — yearning for a liberal hero to tilt the court in their favor on the environment, campaign finance and abortion rights — are already pressing Democrats to abandon Garland.

Chamberlain, whose group has been dismayed by the Garland choice, said DFA would prefer "somebody who is a person of color, a woman, somebody who represents a part of America that has not been represented on the Supreme Court over the years.”

Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been characterized largely as a moderate jurist who sought to build legal consensus in his nearly two decades as an appellate judge. The former federal prosecutor has a record on criminal issues that would seem to favor the government, but on some other issues — such as abortion — advocacy groups say Garland doesn’t have much history for them to sift through.

Clinton has praised Garland for his "brilliant legal mind and a long history of bipartisan support and admiration," but has not made the same pledge as Sanders to renominate someone more liberal.

In an interview on C-Span’s “Newsmakers,” Nan Aron, founder and president of the Alliance for Justice, said it was difficult to surmise the role Garland would assume on the court if confirmed — whether he would be a reliable liberal or a swing vote in the mold of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

“I can say this much: His record, from what we know on the Circuit Court of Appeals, certainly differs very much from Antonin Scalia’s,” Aron said. “He is a judge that has been very respectful of the role agencies play … that’s a far cry from Antonin Scalia, who was very critical of what agencies do.”

But she, too, refused to say whether she would want to see Garland re-nominated.

“Oh, I’m not going there,” Aron said during the C-Span interview, conducted with reporters from POLITICO and The Wall Street Journal. Noting that the next president will likely have more vacancies to fill, “I think we ought to confirm Merrick Garland this year and then see what happens in the future.”

Indeed, some of the progressive groups that put out critical statements immediately after Garland was nominated on Wednesday sounded more enthusiastic by Friday.

CREDO Political Director Murshed Zaheed’s initial reaction to Garland was that his "background does not suggest he will be a progressive champion.” In an interview on Friday, however, Zaheed stressed that Garland would fall squarely into the court’s liberal wing, "right in between Justice Breyer and Justice Sotomayor.”

Asked about Sanders’ comments, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that he “cannot imagine a scenario” in which Obama would withdraw his support from Garland. Obama would “wholeheartedly recommend that his successor carefully consider Garland for the vacancy,” Earnest added.

“At the same time, I think President Obama would acknowledge that the new president would be the person who has the constitutional duty to try again to fill that vacancy on the Supreme Court,” he said.

And others in the liberal movement believe they were dealt a much better hand in Garland than they would have had with Sri Srinivasan, another finalist to replace Scalia who, as an AsianAmerican, would have brought further racial diversity to the Supreme Court.

Srinivasan, who also serves on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has a track record that some on the left looked at with a skeptical eye, including his history defending ExxonMobil, the mining company Rio Tinto and former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling.

"When it came down to Srinivasan and Garland, there was a sigh of relief from some in the progressive community when they heard it would be Garland,” one senior Senate Democratic aide said.

Progressive activists will fan out nationwide starting next week to pressure GOP senators on moving Garland. On Monday, a coalition of liberal groups including MoveOn.org, Civic Action, CREDO Action, Democracy for America, Organizing for Action and PCCC, will hold 50 events across the country including in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — purple states where Senate Republicans are up for reelection.

Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn, said his group, the focus is on pushing the GOP to act on Garland and give him a vote — not whether Garland should stick around for future presidents.

“The thing I am hearing [from MoveOn members] is this slap at the Constitution by the Republicans,” Wikler said. “There’s almost no point in going through qualifications of a nominee if one party is refusing to do its job and yelling ‘no,’ no matter who’s nominated.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.