Could California Attorney General and former San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris be the next nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court? Maybe, says Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog who claims with certainty that Harris is a shoo-in for candidacy. Working on the assumption that Obama will want/win a second term (which seems likely), Goldstein says:
[O]nly one [possibility] truly stands out as checking every box: Kamala Harris. She is the recently elected (2010) Attorney General of California. Previously, she was twice elected as the District Attorney for San Francisco (2004-2010); the chief of the unit heading civil code matters in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office (2000-2004); the head of the career-criminal unit in the San Francisco D.A.’s Office (1998-2000); and Deputy District Attorney for Alameda County (1990-1998). Her mother (a breast cancer specialist) is from India and raised her as a single mother; her father (an economics professor at Stanford) is Jamaican-American. She graduated from Howard University as an undergraduate and went to U.C. Hastings for law school. Coincidentally, Harris is profiled in yesterday’s New York Times.
Harris might not even want the very, very hypothetical gig especially if she's early in her second term as attorney general or, as Goldstein goes on to point out, she wants to sit pretty in the Governor's Office.
But the timing is likely to conspire against Harris. The odds are that, at the time of a hypothetical Ginsburg retirement in the spring of 2015, Harris will be in the very early days of her second term as Attorney General, after a hard fought re-election battle. (It seems unlikely that Jerry Brown, who has been running for office since birth, will pass up a chance at re-election and allow Harris to run for Governor in 2014.) In that event, I cannot see her walking away, particularly with the prospect of the Governor’s mansion four years away. The only way the timing fits is if Harris instead loses in 2014, either seeking re-election or seeking the governorship if Brown does not run again.
What do you think about Harris on the U.S. Supreme Court? (We'd be happy if only so we can say that we used to go to the same gym as a Supreme Court Justice.)
