Amal Thapar: Trump Country's Perfect SCOTUS Choice

[Jazzhead]

Here's an excellent piece profiling my own favorite among the list of SCOTUS nominees that President Trump is considering:

Amal Thapar:  Trump Country's Perfect SCOTUS Choice

For conservatives, Thapar is a dream choice. He’s an originalist, a term associated with Justices Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch and the late Antonin Scalia. Imagine a Supreme Court where the two leading conservative originalists are an African-American and an Indian-American. Trump can absolutely shatter the stereotypes liberals throw at Republicans by having Thapar join Thomas to defend and indeed crusade for the U.S. Constitution.

Thapar would become the youngest member of the Supreme Court at 49, but don’t let his youth fool you. He has an extensive record of distinguished public service — a prosecutor in Ohio, U.S. attorney in Kentucky, trial-court judge, and current judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s thoroughly vetted (confirmed three times by the Senate already) and was even a short-lister for Scalia’s seat last time around.

 
Thapar is a real dude. He and his wife are raising three kids in parochial schools, and the only thing he likes talking about more than the Constitution are the sports and academic exploits of his children. . . .

Thapar spends his free time teaching and lecturing. He teaches at the University of Virginia Law School on the judicial philosophies of Scalia and Thomas and speaks frequently on originalism and textualism at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and other leading law schools. Thapar didn’t graduate from an Ivy League college, but he’s treated like a rock star on their campuses by aspiring conservative lawyers. If the president is looking for Ivy League credentials, he gets the best of both worlds with Thapar – someone from the middle of Trump Country who knows his way around those campuses.

 
Liberals are already freaking out about Thapar. They are so worried about him, in fact, that liberal donors are funding an ad campaign against him before he’s even been chosen. If the president is looking to torment the people most unhappy with his presidency, Thapar is a great choice.

Thapar is known as a great legal writer and a good judge of law clerks, a vital trait for Supreme Court justices. Scalia, Thomas, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, and many other top judges have picked his clerks to serve in their chambers.

For an unexpected president, Thapar is the perfect unexpected choice.

 

[Right_in_Virginia]

Potential nominee profile: Amul Thapar
Scotusblog, Jul 3, 2018

When President Donald Trump selected his first Supreme Court nominee a year and a half ago, only one of the final four frontrunners had never served as a judge on a federal appeals court: Amul Thapar, then a district-court judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky and a favorite of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Although he lacked federal appellate-court experience, usually a prerequisite for a Supreme Court justice, Thapar was one of four candidates, along with Thomas Hardiman, William Pryor and the eventual nominee, Neil Gorsuch, to be interviewed personally by the president. Thapar was not Trump’s pick for that job, but he quickly became the president’s first nominee to a federal court of appeals: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which covers Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. And now, with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, and after more than a year on the 6th Circuit, Thapar is once again reported to be on a presidential shortlist of Supreme Court nominees winnowed from the current group of 25 prospective candidates.

Amul Roger Thapar, who turned 49 in April, has lived most of his life in the Midwest. He was born in Troy, Michigan, to parents who immigrated from India, and he grew up in Toledo, Ohio. He attended Boston College and then the UC Berkeley School of Law, where he received his J.D. in 1994. He served as a law clerk to district court Judge C. Arthur Spiegel in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1994-96 and then to Judge Nathaniel Jones on the 6th Circuit from 1996-97. After a brief stint in Washington, D.C., where he worked in private practice and as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Thapar moved back to Ohio in 2001. As an AUSA for the Southern District of Ohio in 2002, he prosecuted fraud cases in Cincinnati and led a successful case against a conspiracy ring that provided undocumented noncitizens with state-issued driver’s licenses.

In 2006, reportedly at McConnell’s suggestion, Thapar was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky. (Thapar lived in a Kentucky town that was just across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati.) A year later, President George W. Bush nominated him to be a district-court judge. After Thapar was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2007, he became the first federal court judge of South Asian descent. On March 21, 2017, Trump nominated Thapar to the 6th Circuit. Thapar sailed through a confirmation hearing that lasted less than 90 minutes, and he was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 52-44 on May 25, 2017.

According to a 2016 report in the Louisville Courier-Journal, “Thapar’s father, Raj Thapar, who owns a heating and air-conditioning supply business in Toledo, Ohio, says his son is so conservative that he ‘nearly wouldn’t speak to me after I voted for Barack Obama.’” The Lexington Herald Leader reported when Thapar was nominated to the 6th Circuit that “lawyers across the political spectrum praised [him] as a highly intellectual, thoughtful and hard-working judge.” At Thapar’s district-court confirmation hearing, McConnell told the senators that Thapar had “founded a brand-new chapter of the well-respected Street Law program, which sends law school students into underprivileged high schools to teach the basic underpinnings of our legal system.” The Associated Press reports that McConnell “has encouraged Trump to consider Thapar” for Kennedy’s seat. Thapar, who, according to his father, was raised to be culturally Hindu but not devout, converted to Catholicism when he married Kim Schulte. Thapar and Schulte have three children and live in Covington, Kentucky.



Read more:  http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/07/potential-nominee-profile-amul-thapar/

[Jazzhead]

Trump Should Take a Serious Look at Amul Thapar for the Supreme Court

Perhaps it's unsurprising given his background, but Thapar’s jurisprudence suggests he well understands a fundamental American truth worth repeating this week as we celebrate Independence Day: In the United States, we the people govern ourselves. In legal practice, individual liberty and self-governance require a commitment to textualism and originalism, such that judges stick to the text of the laws they apply and the original meaning of the Constitution.

But don’t just take that from his biography — it’s for his record that Thapar, at 49, is regarded as one of the nation’s brightest young judges. Take the separation of powers. When a criminal defendant argued that Thapar should oversee the Justice Department’s internal procedures for prosecuting murderers, Thapar held that the Constitution prohibited a judge from micromanaging the executive branch’s core law-enforcement powers. Thapar explained in United States v. Slone (2013) that federal courts “may not direct the Executive Branch how to exercise its traditional prosecutorial discretion,” which “includes the decision whether to seek the death penalty.” He specifically relied on the long American and English traditions of executive control over prosecution.



Or take federalism: In Bowling v. Parker (2012), Judge Thapar likewise relied on history when faced with a broad constitutional challenge to Congress’s restrictions on habeas corpus relief for state prisoners. He rejected the argument that Congress unconstitutionally limited prisoner relitigation. He did so after examining how the writ was understood “at the founding” and explained why Congress acted consistently with the Constitution’s original public meaning.

Thapar has an equally strong record on interpreting statutes. His comprehensive analysis of the criminal forfeiture statute in United States v. Solomon (2016) nicely showcases his principles, even in a highly technical case. “Start with the text," he wrote. Binding precedent said the forfeiture statute imposed joint liability on criminals, so he did what the higher court required. But Thapar was not shy about explaining his contrary view. He looked to dictionary definitions, context, rules of interpretation, and the “background law” of criminal forfeiture going “back to the founding” to explain why that the precedent was wrong. The Supreme Court ultimately vindicated Judge Thapar, unanimously rejecting the Sixth Circuit’s atextual approach in Honeycutt v. United States (2017).

Given our vast administrative state, Judge Thapar has warily guarded against the temptation to deem a complex law “ambiguous” so that an agency can rewrite the provision to mean whatever the agency would like. In Duncan v. Muzyn (from 2018, one of his first cases as a Sixth Circuit judge), he aptly explained that “simply calling something ambiguous does not make it so, even if interpretation is no easy task.” To apply the provision’s plain language, Thapar rigorously examined the text using dictionary definitions and surrounding context to conclude that one side’s interpretation “better account[ed] for the language at issue.” Indeed, he has even questioned whether deferring to agencies’ interpretations of their own regulations makes sense at all — see M.L. Johnson Family Properties v. Jewell (2017) — echoing the concerns raised in recent years by Justices Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas.

These are just a few examples from a stellar record. Over the last decade, Thapar has issued over 600 opinions, being reversed only 11 times. He even wrote 36 opinions (and joined 84 others) as an appellate judge “sitting by designation” while he was still on the trial bench — meaning that he sought out and was asked to undertake far more work and greater responsibility than was required.

[INVAR]

And once again we see pretend "Conservatives" once again using the Democrat playbook of Identity Politics and skin color to push a person they want in a position of power.

[Oceander]

And once again we see pretend "Conservatives" once again using the Democrat playbook of Identity Politics and skin color to push a person they want in a position of power.

Nobody posting on this thread has advocated that he be nominated solely because of his skin color.  In fact, nobody has even made it a factor. 

On the other hand, you appear to be denigrating a good candidate solely because of his skin color. 

[Bigun]

Anyone on the president's list,  and certainly any of those he has interviewed, willbe fine with me.

[Oceander]

Anyone on the president's list,  and certainly any of those he has interviewed, willbe fine with me.

[Bigun]

If i personally had to choose,  I would go with Amy Barrett this time but it isn't up to me is it?

[INVAR]

Nobody posting on this thread has advocated that he be nominated solely because of his skin color.  In fact, nobody has even made it a factor. 

On the other hand, you appear to be denigrating a good candidate solely because of his skin color.

From the sources above:

Imagine a Supreme Court where the two leading conservative originalists are an African-American and an Indian-American.

The source made it a factor if you had bothered to read it, and in previous threads about the SCOTUS nominee Jazzy here asserted his skin color and ethnicity was a resume enhancer.  So yes, it has already been made a factor.

[TomSea]

Another Catholic, as said, anybody on the list, hopefully, should do the job well. They need to interview them thoroughly. Britt Grant seems to be another good choice still. It's pretty clear to me, how Mike Lee would rule on the issues. That's almost a sure bet.

[Jazzhead]

Judge Thapar is a good man and faithful Constitutionalist.   INVAR,  your lack of character and class shows through in every word you write.   

[INVAR]

Judge Thapar is a good man and faithful Constitutionalist.   INVAR,  your lack of character and class shows through in every word you write.

That is a compliment coming from the likes of you.

And - YOU were the one to bring up his ethnicity as some kind of bonus benefit in the other threads discussing the vacancy.  Illustrating that identity politics is as much a part of you as it is with the Left.

I have not opined on his character, judicial acumen or potential Originalist leanings he may or may not have.  I simply commented on the fact that his skin color and ethnicity is being trumpeted as a selling point  - which I personally find reprehensible.

[Jazzhead]

I simply commented on the fact that his skin color and ethnicity is being trumpeted as a selling point  - which I personally find reprehensible.

Judge Thapar's credentials - entirely apart from his ethnicity - are sterling.   In the political ju-jitsu in which we are engaged with the Dems,  his ethnicity - just like Clarence Thomas' before him - is a "resume enhancer" only in the sense that it puts the lie to the Dem obsession with identity politics. 

I was, I'll admit, reluctant to start this thread even though I strongly believe Judge Thapar is the best choice for the nomination, for exactly what has happened here - anything I post, even without my own editorial comment attached, is immediately fodder for personal attack.

I can only ask that folks read the two articles I attached without prejudice.   An impossibility for INVAR, but hopefully not for most of the other members here.     

[Oceander]

That is a compliment coming from the likes of you.

And - YOU were the one to bring up his ethnicity as some kind of bonus benefit in the other threads discussing the vacancy.  Illustrating that identity politics is as much a part of you as it is with the Left.

I have not opined on his character, judicial acumen or potential Originalist leanings he may or may not have.  I simply commented on the fact that his skin color and ethnicity is being trumpeted as a selling point  - which I personally find reprehensible.

The only one making his skin color a defining attribute here is you. 

[Bigun]

The only one making his skin color a defining attribute here is you.

I have to agree with @INVAR that the article itself does that.

[Oceander]

I have to agree with @INVAR that the article itself does that.

It states it as at most a nifty accessory. It doesn’t make it a replacement for any of the other desirable attributes in a judge, which this guy seems to have in spades.