It would be interesting of Obama did nominate a staunch centrist right out of the gate, as a gambit to get in a new justice confirmed before the likes of Donald Trump gets to make a nomination.
Edit;
My guess for nomination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Srinivasan
He's a Stanford guy, Indian, already sailed through the Senate for a DC Court of Appeals position, disliked by Unions, and by all accounts a brilliant legal mind. He's successfully represented corporate clients (e.g. Skilling in Skilling vs. USA) and had a successful career in the private world.
This somewhat contradicts my first paragraph, but he's definitely to the right of Kagan or Sotamayor.
Are there any examples where a liberal president nominated a conservative or vice-versa?
(I'm not talking about situations where someone was appointed as a conservative and moved gradually left, which actually happens to all justices.)
By no means a rule, but a tradition at least.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/antonin-scalia-fighter-priva...
He was intensely conservative.
As tptacek said, political labels aren't necessarily objective, so this graph would differ depending on the methodology. It's also a little harder to measure justices' leanings because there are so few data points.
In this case, I doubt it applies. In theory Obama could pick a nominee closer to the center to avoid a tiresome confirmation battle, but I suspect there's a bigger bang for the buck in nominating fairly left-wing candidates and making the Republican Senate choose between looking obstructionist to the general public or looking weak to their base.
Could you explain why this might cost the Republicans votes? Their core voters would absolutely love them standing up to the "tyranny" of Obama. Even independent/undecided voters would understand that its reasonable enough to postpone considering how close the Presidential election is.
To be clear, I think it would be best to have it completed within 3 months, like the previous 10 nominations to the court but I don't think it will cost the Republicans at all to postpone it till next year.
However, my impression is that independent voters prefer action to inaction and typical behavior to atypical, and will be susceptible to 'the Senate is refusing to do its job' arguments from the President and the Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 'Supreme Court appointments are usually approved in XX days' arguments from the press.
We shall see.
So between the two justices, Alito + Roberts is definitely to the right of Rehnquist + O'Connor, but pretty moderate considering the possibility of two far-right justices.
I've never heard of that and have reason to think otherwise: Presidents see the Supreme Court appointments as a chance to leave their mark on the judiciary. Could you provide some evidence?
That's bad, because it will perpetuate party politics. No matter how much people dislike the candidate nominated by their party, they'll think they've got no recourse but to vote for him/her lest they lose the Court.
All the Republicans I know who say they'll vote for Clinton before they'd vote for Trump - and there are plenty of those - won't follow through. The chance we might have had for an olive branch, reaching out of the viper pit of party politics, is now gone.
So a real compromise candidate might be possible. It'd likely depend on Obama and the senate Democrats as well, though.
it's actually pretty unlikely. Fivethirtyeight has a bunch of good articles about this, but the simplest piece of information pointing to it: Trump is intensely disliked by about 60% of the voting public. He's got a vocal and enthusiastic following, but once you go outside that bubble, he simply doesn't have room to grow.
I voted for Bush twice, McCain, and Romney, and I'll vote for either Hillary or Bernie (two candidates I can't stand) over Trump, and I'm far from alone.
Bush and Cruz are in my "hold my nose and vote" tier.
Carson isn't presidential material IMO.