Many thanks to Dana Milbank for the column showing Merrick Garland’s eminent suitability for the Supreme Court nomination (“Republicans squirm over court nominee’s squeaky-clean past,” April 7).

Mr. Milbank suggests that if a Democrat is elected to the presidency in November, “there will be pressure from the left to drop Garland” and appoint a liberal candidate.

If the next president is a Democrat – and if I were in a position to advise her or him on a Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia – I would urge that Garland be named, not only because he is somewhere in the middle between “liberal” and conservative, but also because he might help the court return to the original conception of the Supreme Court as the ultimate independent judiciary.

The Supreme Court justices are supposed to make their decisions not according to the party of the president who named them, but according to the best interests of the citizens in a democracy. By refusing to consider the Supreme Court nomination of a president in his last term, the Republicans are admitting that their idea of the court is entirely political.

In his 1922 biography of Maine’s only U.S. Supreme Court justice, “Nathan Clifford, Democrat,” Philip Greely Clifford wrote about the Electoral Commission of 1876, which was chaired by Justice Clifford and was to decide the virtually tied presidential election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes.

Philip Greely Clifford was saddened by the political nature of the final appointments to the 15-member commission (five of whom were justices of the Supreme Court):

“It plainly presupposes that all of them would vote on every question according to their political faith. It fails to recognize the possibility of their being changed in opinion by any of the facts presented for their consideration.”

Janet Carper

Cornish

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