Now that Donald Trump is the nation’s 45th president-elect, a list of what he called “ultra-conservative” constitutionalists will be considered to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, reports the New York Daily News. In September, before his first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump revealed a second list of potential court candidates. It followed in the footsteps of the first, consisting mostly of unrelentingly conservative white men, this time with the exceptions of one white female, one African-American male, one Asian male, and one Hispanic male.
Mirroring the first list, the second one included constitutional scholars hostile to abortion rights, same-sex marriage and more or less all types of federal regulations. The list of 21 candidates “is definitive and I will choose only from it in picking future justices of the United States Supreme Court,” he said. Because Republicans refused to consider President Obama’s proposal to fill Scalia’s vacancy with federal appeals judge Merrick Garland, the decision now lies in Trump’s hands. If Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83, also leaves, Trump might be given the opportunity to fill two Supreme Court seats and disrupt the balance of a somewhat even divide between liberal and conservative justices.