I have two horrifying words to answer this question: Justice Palin
Oof, I hadn't thought of that. She's still young, too. Gulp.
She's not a lawyer. You can relax.
Trump may well nominate the most qualified Justices, almost regardless of ideology. That's actually how it used to be before the GOP blocked the nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice. This was the start of the ideological confirmation fights. It was Herbert Hoover who appointed Louis Brandeis, a liberal jurist, and it was FDR who appointed Felix Frankfurter, who was a Strict Constructionalist. Truman appointed the moderates Fred Vinson and Tom Clark, while Eisenhower appointed liberals Earl Warren and William Brennan as well as centrist Potter Stewart. JFK appointed the liberal Arthur Goldberg, but he also appointed the surprisingly conservative Byron White.
Wasn't Forbas a LBJ hack who had serious ethical issues?
Fortas was a top-flight jurist, who was rated "Near Great" at the time of his resignation from the bench. He was described as "the most brilliant legal mind ever produced by Yale Law School", and his short career was full of substantial opinions. He was also Clarence Earl Gideon's counsel before the SCOTUS in Gi
deon v. Wainwright, a landmark decision establishing the right of criminal defendants to legal counsel, regardless of ability to pay. He was an LBJ appointee, and he was LBJ's attorney before the Federal Courts in the 1948 case that sealed his 87 vote "victory" against former Gov. Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Democratic Senate Primary (tantamount to the election), but his credentials as a jurist were without question.
Fortas's ethical issues did not surface during his 1968 nomination period. His nomination was derailed by a coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats; his rejection gave Nixon the motivation to nominate a Southerner to the Court solely because the nominee was a Southerner. However, in 1969, it was revealed that Fortas, while a sitting SCOTUS Justice, accepted a $20K retainer from financier Louis Wolfson, while Wolfson was under investigation for Securities Law Violations. (Wolfson would later be convicted of felonies and sentenced to prison.) In return for unspecified "advice", Wolfson would pay $20K annually to Fortas for life, and continue to pay this money to Fortas's widow should he die first. The allegation was that this money was obtained to induce Fortas to work to quash any indictment of Wolfson by LBJ's Justice Department, or to obtain a pardon for Wolfson from LBJ. There is no evidence that Fortas intervened on Wolfson's behalf, but the ethical implications were overwhelming, and pressure for Fortas to resign came from some of his liberal SCOTUS colleagues in order to avoid impeachment proceedings.
