On Monday morning, President Donald Trump interviewed four federal appellate judges for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. As reported by the New York Times, he met with each judge one on one, for up to 45 minutes each.

As I first reported last night, the finalists the president interviewed are as follows:

Judge Amy Coney Barrett (7th Cir.), 46, of Indiana

Judge Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.), 53, of Maryland

Judge Raymond Kethledge (6th Cir.), 51, of Michigan

Judge Amul Thapar (6th Cir.), 49, of Kentucky

In addition, President Trump said he expects to meet with two or three more prospects over the next few days. I previously mentioned Judge Thomas Hardiman (3d Cir.), 52, of Pennsylvania, and Judge Joan Larsen (6th Cir.), 49, of Michigan, as possibilities, but time will tell. (Per the Washington Post, Judge Hardiman remains under consideration, even though he didn’t meet with the president yesterday).

Yesterday afternoon, I explained why I believe the nominee would — and should — be either Judge Brett Kavanaugh or Judge Raymond Kethledge. I stand by that assessment, which has only grown stronger in light of recent news about Judge Kavanaugh’s deep support in the legal community and Judge Kethledge’s reportedly strong interview performance (per Bloomberg). But allow me to add a few more thoughts.

First, the passionate supporters of Judge Barrett, aka #TeamAmy, will be disappointed to learn that it won’t be her, at least this time around (despite predictions to the contrary by such knowledgeable observers as Chris Cillizza). The conservative legal world loves Judge Barrett, and she’s a rising star of the federal judiciary. But with just eight months on the bench, it would be a stretch to say her star has already risen — and the White House recognizes this.

Amy Coney Barrett burst onto the scene because of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s disastrous “dogma lives loudly within you” comments at Barrett’s confirmation hearings. That made Barrett a heroine within social-conservative circles, but it didn’t give her what the other three finalists have — namely, a decade or more of federal judicial service.

The Trump Administration shrewdly realized that it could score points with its base by making Judge Barrett a finalist. But it won’t actually nominate her, given the expected Democratic onslaught. She would be attacked as lacking judicial experience — and that attack, unlike many of the ones I expected to be leveled against the nominee, would actually be accurate. As I’ve suggested before, Judge Barrett should acquire more experience and be nominated for a future vacancy. At 46, she still has five to 10 years ahead of her as a credible SCOTUS candidate.

Second, even though my earlier post focused on Judge Kavanaugh and Judge Kethledge, and even though they remain the frontrunners, Judge Thapar shouldn’t be counted out. President Trump likes a number of things about Thapar: that he was the first Trump nominee to the circuit courts, that he would be the first Asian American justice, and that he would be the first South Asian American justice. (Remember that President Trump has been courting the Indian-American community for quite some time — or as Trump once put it, “We love Hindus!”)

And there’s so much else to like about Judge Thapar: his educational background, which is both impressive and a refreshing departure from the Harvard-Yale dominance of SCOTUS (Boston College for undergrad, UC Berkeley for law school); his real-world experience in the courtroom, as both a federal prosecutor and trial judge; his judicial record, as both a trial judge and judge sitting by designation on the circuit courts, on issues like originalism, federalism, separation of powers, and religious liberty; his excellent legal writing (see, e.g., this shoutout from Howard Bashman of How Appealing); his insanely low reversal rate as a trial judge (just 11 times in over nine years, some of them because he was reviewed by non-textualist or non-originalist Sixth Circuit judges); his two unanimous ratings of “Well Qualified” from the American Bar Association, in 2007 (district court) and 2017 (circuit court); and his voice-vote confirmations as U.S. Attorney and district judge.

(Yes, his Sixth Circuit vote, in the wake of the bruising Neil Gorsuch confirmation battle, was 52-44. But that’s more of a depressing commentary on the polarized times in which we live, not any shortcoming on Thapar’s part.)

So Judge Thapar remains in contention. Don’t be shocked if he gets the nomination (especially if the surrogates for his rivals knock each other out, leaving him as the last judge standing). But if he doesn’t get it this time around, Judge Thapar should — and surely will — be considered for a future vacancy, just like Judge Barrett.

Third, some supporters of Judge Kavanaugh complained about my earlier Kavanaugh/Kethledge post, even though it said such things as:

Judge Kavanaugh is — and deserves to be — one of the top two candidates.

As repeatedly noted in these pages over the years, Judge Kavanaugh is the #1 feeder judge of clerks to the Supreme Court. He sends clerks to almost all the justices, on both sides of the aisle — “a sign of the deep respect that his possible future colleagues have for him.”

Criticisms of Judge Kavanaugh come from “a bunch of haters,” and they are without merit.

As a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Judge Kavanaugh has the best educational pedigree of all the finalists.

Judge Kavanaugh has the “stronge[st] network among conservative legal elites,” which could help his confirmation in any number of ways.

This post came on the heels of my post from last week, in which I identified Judge Kavanaugh as the frontrunner for the vacancy; described him as “a highly respected judge on the super-powerful D.C. Circuit”; praised him as “conservative and credentialed,” as well as “tall and good-looking”; and labeled him “a ‘winner,’ in a figurative and literal sense — figuratively because of his amazing legal career, and literally in terms of his running career.”

Admittedly, I didn’t touch upon how wonderful Judge Kavanaugh is as a person. His colleagues adore him — don’t be surprised if some of them speak in his support if he winds up being the nominee — and so do his law clerks, who praise him as a mentor and friend. He’s committed to diversity in clerk hiring: out of his 48 clerks, 25 are women and 13 are diverse — astounding numbers by the standards of feeder judges, who tend to be white males hiring other white males.

The fact that Judge Kavanaugh has managed to send 39 out of these 48 clerks to SCOTUS is a testament to the fact that there’s no tradeoff between diversity and excellence. You just need to work harder at it — as Judge Kavanaugh does, traveling to law schools on his own dime to mentor diverse students, meet with minority law student groups, and give them advice on applying for clerkships.

So there has been no shortage of praise for Judge Kavanaugh in these pages, both recently and over time. But some members of #TeamKavanaugh complained to me because they felt that yesterday’s Kavanaugh/Kethledge post, standing alone, tilted too much toward Kethledge.

Fair enough; I can see why they felt that way, given the greater number of words devoted to Judge Kethledge. But I should clarify that this imbalance in word count was mainly a function of the fact that Judge Kavanaugh is a giant legal celebrity who has dominated the pages of Above the Law and other legal news outlets for more than a decade, while Judge Kethledge is less of a known quantity who needs more of an introduction.

As I tried to explain in the post, I adore both Judge Kavanaugh and Judge Kethledge, and I hope — and fully expect — that one of them will be the nominee. The choice is up to President Trump, based on his own personal preference rather than any objective factors, and he can’t go wrong.

Some Kavanaugh supporters misread the post as arguing that Kethledge “deserves” the SCOTUS seat more than Kavanaugh. That’s not the case; to the contrary, if one were to go on a theory of desert, Kavanaugh deserves it more than Kethledge. There’s no one out there who has labored longer or harder in the Republican/conservative legal vineyard, as both a lawyer and a judge, than Brett Kavanaugh (which is why criticisms of him from conservatives are especially misguided).

The main point I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that Judge Kethledge would be easier to confirm than Judge Kavanaugh. I stand by that point, because it is objectively true. As a Sixth Circuit judge, Kethledge hasn’t handled as many hot-button issues as Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit, so Kethledge has less “baggage” than Kavanaugh. (See also this Washington Post piece by Hugh Hewitt, arguing for Kethledge in part because of confirmability.)

But you know what? Ease of confirmation is not the only factor. No matter who the nominee is, this fight won’t be easy — and some fights are worth having. Because Judge Kavanaugh has more of a record, than pretty much all the nominees, on the most controversial issues of the day — abortion, the administrative state, Obamacare, separation of powers — he has demonstrated both his brilliance and his conservatism, time and time again. And when it comes to a life-tenured seat on the highest court in the land, that makes him worth fighting for.

Kavanaugh’s supporters argue, quite validly, that it’s not fair to compare a judge of the D.C. Circuit to a judge on a regional appeals court. Sure, many of the D.C. Circuit’s cases are boring and uncontroversial admin law cases, but the ones that are controversial are really controversial — abortions for immigrant minors, the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, the constitutionality of numerous federal agencies and regulations. So should Judge Kavanaugh be “penalized” for sitting on the nation’s second most important and influential court, where he has been forced to grapple with complex and controversial issues that the other nominees have never faced?

Some conservatives, especially ones out in the heartland, seem to harbor some bias against Judge Kavanaugh because he’s based in the “swamp” of D.C. or from “inside the Beltway.” But this bias makes no sense, since he has basically been fighting the good fight for conservative causes — e.g., against the administrative state and government overreach — from within the heart of Mordor. And conservatives definitely don’t want to establish some rule against nominees from the D.C. Circuit, the court that produced two of their heroes, the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas.

I could go on and on singing the praises of Judge Kavanaugh — but I really can’t do any better than J.D. Vance, the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy (affiliate link). Vance just wrote a fantastic Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled The Case for Brett Kavanaugh. Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

What should President Trump look for in a Supreme Court nominee? Exactly what he did with his selection of Justice Neil Gorsuch and his slate of lower-court nominees. He should ask one question: Who is best at being a judge, as demonstrated by a consistent record of applying textualist and originalist reasoning to significant legal questions? Given the reported options Mr. Trump is now considering, the answer is obvious: Judge Brett Kavanaugh…. From the start of his career, he’s applied the Constitution faithfully, even when that made him a lonely voice. He has done so with particular tenacity on the issue that matters most to the president: taking power away from unelected bureaucrats and returning it to elected officials. Consider his 2008 dissent in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, arguing that an administrative agency violated the separation of powers. In 2010 the Supreme Court agreed with Judge Kavanaugh, in a 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Judge Kavanaugh’s PCAOB opinion also served as a foundation for his recent opinions in PHH v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which he made a similar case against Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, the CFPB. By my count, Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions have been adopted by the justices 11 times—a record of influence and persuasion that suggests he would be effective on the still-divided high court. His influence has been especially notable in cases involving overreach by regulatory agencies. In two different Environmental Protection Agency cases, each involving billions of dollars in regulatory burdens, the Supreme Court adopted Judge Kavanaugh’s dissenting views in 5-4 decisions by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. His judicial record spans just about every important area of the law, and conservatives should be happy with the results. He sided with the Trump administration in rejecting the American Civil Liberties Union’s demand that the government facilitate an immediate abortion for an illegal-alien teenager in federal custody. He rejected the Obama administration’s attempt to coerce religious groups to provide contraception to employees. He stood by Scalia’s strong originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment and rejected balancing tests designed to undermine the right to keep and bear arms.

To sum up:

Judge Kavanaugh’s record shows him to be a jurist who adheres to his principles and can influence his future colleagues on the bench. He is the most qualified candidate by all the criteria that matter. On top of that, he is a good and decent man of integrity. He would be a worthy Supreme Court justice.

Amen. Good luck and Godspeed, Judge Kavanaugh.

UPDATE (10:02 p.m.): President Trump also interviewed Senator Mike Lee yesterday, by phone, and has now interviewed a total of seven candidates.

Trump interviews Supreme Court candidates as political fight over Kennedy replacement intensifies [Washington Post]

Trump Interviews 4 Supreme Court Candidates and Revamps Staff to Push Nomination [New York Times]

Trump Has Interviewed Four for Supreme Court Seat, Sources Say [Bloomberg]

Donald Trump’s dream casting for America’s next SCOTUS justice: Amy Coney Barrett [CNN]

The Case for Brett Kavanaugh [Wall Street Journal]

Kavanaugh Allies Muster ‘Army’ of Lawyers to Back Potential SCOTUS Pick [National Law Journal]

Earlier:

David Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.