Nation/World

As Trump prepares to unveil Supreme Court pick, both parties prepare for battle

With hours to go until President Trump reveals his choice to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, the White House on Monday named former senator Jon Kyl of Arizona as the "sherpa" who will guide the eventual nominee through the Senate, while Democrats and Republicans continued to spar over the four leading candidates.

Kyl, a Republican who rose to the No. 2 spot in the Senate before his retirement in 2013, is a veteran of Supreme Court confirmation battles, having served on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmations of four of the last five justices to join the court. He is currently a lobbyist in the Washington headquarters of Covington & Burling.

The move comes as Trump has remained coy about his final Supreme Court decision, which is expected to be announced Monday at 9 p.m. from among the four federal judges atop his shortlist: Brett M. Kavanaugh, Thomas Hardiman, Raymond Kethledge and Amy Coney Barrett.

"I have long heard that the most important decision a U.S. President can make is the selection of a Supreme Court Justice," Trump said in a tweet Monday morning.

Kavanaugh, who lives in the Maryland suburbs, serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Hardiman, who is based in Pennsylvania, is on the 3rd Circuit. Michigan's Kethledge is on the 6th Circuit, while Indiana's Barrett is on the 7th Circuit.

Hardiman, a runner-up when Trump chose Neil Gorsuch as his high court nominee last year, received a wave of new attention in the weekend discussions, according to two people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak publicly about it.

But White House officials cautioned that Trump's informal conversations with golf partners and friends did not necessarily hint at whom he would ultimately select, a decision that could tilt the bench to the right for decades.

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Conservative outside groups are standing at the ready to make the case for Trump's Supreme Court choice, whoever it may be.

The Judicial Crisis Network, which has already launched an ad blitz in the wake of Kennedy's retirement last month, announced Monday that it is embarking on a new week-long, $1.4 million ad campaign touting the eventual nominee's biography. The group spent a total of about $10 million last year in an effort to ease the confirmation of Trump's first Supreme Court pick, Gorsuch.

The new round of ads will run nationally and will also target four states - Alabama, Indiana, North Dakota and West Virginia - all of which were won by Trump in double-digit victories in 2016. In the latter three states, vulnerable Senate Democrats face tough reelection battles this November, while in Alabama, Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who joined the Senate after besting embattled Republican nominee Roy Moore in a special election last year, is likely to come under pressure to back Trump's choice.

In a sign that the White House will try to pressure vulnerable Democrats to support Trump's nominee, both Sens. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said they were invited to Monday night's event at the White House.

"While I appreciate the invitation from the White House to attend this evening's announcement, I declined so that I can meet first with the nominee in a setting where we can discuss his or her experience and perspectives," Donnelly said in a statement. "In the coming days, I will be reviewing the record and qualifications of the president's nominee."

Heitkamp also said she wouldn't attend.

"She has made clear - as she said to the president in person two weeks ago - that she considers fully vetting Supreme Court nominees one of the most important jobs of any U.S. senator, and she plans to fulfill that critical duty," her spokeswoman, Abigail McDonough, said.

Republicans hold a razor-thin 51-to-49 majority in the Senate, giving them little wiggle room in a nomination battle that is expected to last until at least early October.

All four of Trump's finalists were culled from a preselected list of 25 judges, curated by White House Counsel Donald McGahn with the help of Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society.

Democrats have made health care and reproductive rights the centerpiece of their argument against Trump's nominee, and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., doubled down on that argument in a speech on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, arguing that "those rights would be gravely threatened" by any nominee from Trump's list.

"No one has been more dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade than Leonard Leo," Schumer said, referring to the landmark abortion rights ruling.

Sen. Robert Casey Jr., D-Pa., who voted against Gorsuch and is facing reelection in a state Trump narrowly won, announced Monday that he will oppose anyone Trump chooses.

"This list is the bidding of corporate special interests hell-bent on handing health care over to insurance companies, crushing unions that represent working men and women, and promoting policies that will leave the middle-class further behind," Casey said in a statement. "Any judge on this list is fruit of a corrupt process straight from the D.C. swamp."

His statement drew the attention of deputy White House press secretary Raj Shah, who tweeted that it was "unfortunate (though not surprising) that even before his or her qualifications can be evaluated, Sen. Casey is refusing to even consider the President's #SCOTUS nominee."

Protect Our Care, a liberal health-care advocacy group, pounced on the news of Kyl's appointment, criticizing him as "a Big Pharma lobbyist" and arguing that his selection means that Trump's priorities lie "with insurance and drug companies, not the 130 million Americans with a preexisting condition."

As the hour of Trump's announcement neared, some Republicans were still taking to the airwaves to make the case for their favored candidate.

In an interview on Fox News Monday afternoon, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, described Barrett as a "tremendous woman" and said she would be "an excellent choice." The TV appearance came days after Hatch further fueled speculation around Trump's choice with an op-ed in the Deseret News using the pronoun "she" when describing the potential Supreme Court nominee.

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Hardiman's boosters, sensing this weekend that he could be ascending on the president's list, have been busy making phone calls to friends in Trump's inner circle. His working-class roots - he drove a taxi during his days as a law student at Georgetown University - have been cited as a plus inside the White House, along with his conservative rulings.

Some experts contend that regardless who Trump picks from among his favored quartet of judges, the difference when it comes to actual court decisions will be minimal.

"When there's so little actual daylight between the four front-runners, it's not surprising that the partisans are going to try to grasp onto whatever micro distinction they can find," said Stephen Vladeck, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas Law School. "But in the process we lose sight of the far more important points, which is just how much any of them would move the court to the right."

Vladeck said that none of the four judges believed to be the front-runners "have the sort of centrist features that came to characterize much, although not all, of Justice Kennedy's jurisprudence."

"There are differences among the four of them that might show up in how they write their opinions, how they interact with their colleagues, what they do in their spare time, but I don't think those differences are going to be reflected in any of their votes," he said. "And certainly not many of their votes."

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The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim, John Wagner and Mark Berman contributed to this report.

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