If Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election next Tuesday, she could have a former San Antonian on her radar for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wallace Jefferson, a 53-year-old John Jay alum, former president of the San Antonio Bar Association and former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, was the topic of discussion during an email exchange between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Christopher Stone, president of the Open Society Foundations, an organization funded by Democratic sugar daddy George Soros.

The emails, contained in a recent WikiLeaks document dump, were exchanged on the evening of February 13, only hours after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a luxury resort in West Texas.

Backed by a subject line that read “Scalia replacement,” Stone emailed Podesta the following question: “Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, (former) Chief Justice in Texas?”

Podesta replied, “Yup.”

There’s much that this brief exchange doesn’t tell us, and Stone did not respond to an interview request for this column. But a few points are obvious.

We know that Stone and Podesta didn’t wait long after Scalia’s passing to start contemplating how his seat should be filled. We also know that the two men had talked about Jefferson as a potential Supreme Court appointee even before Scalia’s sudden, surprising death.

It’s not hard to understand why two Democrats such as Stone and Podesta would find this Texas Republican intriguing.

Almost immediately after Scalia’s death, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would block any appointee offered by President Barack Obama, on the grounds that a lame duck with less than a year in office should let their successor fill the vacancy. When Obama offered up Merrick Garland, a milquetoast moderate with nearly 20 years of experience on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Senate took no action.

In recent weeks, two veteran Republican senators — John McCain and Richard Burr — have upped the partisan ante, pledging that if Clinton wins the presidency, they will automatically reject her Supreme Court appointments.

Given this hostile, hyper-partisan climate, Jefferson could offer a bipartisan solution.

He is an African American Republican who was appointed to this state’s highest bench by former Gov. Rick Perry; a compassionate conservative with an independent streak; an appellate attorney who has represented deep-pocketed interests; and a thoughtful jurist who has spoken with eloquence about the need to make the court system work for people on the low end of the economic ladder.

Jefferson also has a compelling story. The descendant of a slave who went on to become a Waco City Council member during Reconstruction, and the son of an Air Force major, he became the first African American justice on the Texas Supreme Court.

For progressive Democrats, who carry visions of Elizabeth Warren filling Scalia’s old seat on the bench, Jefferson would be a letdown, but a letdown they would accept.

For Republicans, he would be a hard candidate to reject, regardless of their hatred for Clinton.

Jefferson, whose law practice is currently based in Austin, declined to comment on the possibility of a Supreme Court appointment. But he knows the conjecture is out there.

Back in March 2015, “Texas Week” host Rick Casey wrote an op-ed for the San Antonio Express-News, suggesting that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred before Obama left office, the president should give Jefferson a serious look.

That same argument would apply to Clinton next year.

Jefferson’s most appealing quality — aside from his incisive mind and fundamental decency — is his refusal to let partisan thinking contaminate his commitment to the rule of law.

“I’m feeling like I’m independent,” he told the Longview News-Journal in 2002.

Although Jefferson was the beneficiary of straight-ticket Republican voting in Texas, he has consistently argued that this state must reform its partisan system for electing judges.

In 2013, he told The Atlantic: “I don’t like the concept of a Republican or Democratic judge. I think fundraising undermines the confidence in a fair and impartial judicial system.”

Jefferson would be for Clinton what Anthony Kennedy turned out to be for Ronald Reagan: a compromise choice who can’t be pigeonholed. And that might be just what the court needs right now.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470