Harlan Fiske Stone was actually Coolidge’s ONLY SCOTUS appointee. It was a terrible choice on par with Ford’s sole selection of John Paul Stevens. FDR could hide behind a bipartisan facade by elevating Stone to Chief Justice while secure in the knowledge he was a left-winger.
As for Sandoval, a social leftist CINO (Catholic in name only) is a slap in the face to Justice Scalia’s memory. A gargantuan “HELL, NO !” to him.
The thing about appointing Governors rather than obscure judges is that Governors have paper trails. We KNOW for a fact that Sandoval is a pro-abortion Catholic In Name Only and pro-illegal alien. We didn't know anything about Souter's beliefs because he had only been on the NH Supreme Court for 6 months and hadn't written any major decisions.
When it came to Governors, I'm surprised Obama didn't go with one of the worthless Utah RINOs. If his pal Jon Huntsman had a law degree, he'd be ideal to give the RATs another reliable liberal vote on the court while the seat technically remains "R".
Hopefully, Sandoval will decline and it will be a repeat of when Obama tried to get Judd Gregg to take a cabinet post so he could have the RAT governor of NH fill his Senate seat with some Dede Scozzafava type DIABLO. The Republican Senators do need to "meet with" Sandoval -- but in private to tell him flat out that he needs to decline any nomination from Obama or they will hold it up in the Senate forever and it will damage his future political career.
If I had been Governor of Illinois when Obama's Senate seat was vacant and a replacement had to be named, I would have pulled the reverse move and named some solidly pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-gun rural downstate Democrat (a Glenn Poshard type or maybe a Lipinski type) to fill the vacancy, knowing that anyone I appointed with an "R" next to his name would be ruthlessly targeted in RAT controlled Illinois and immediately purged the next general election. Let them try to primary a popular downstate RAT in their own party.
>> In our role of advising, we are sending these 3 Scalia clones as nominees we will support. <<
Heh. There IS precedent for this. Remember when Sandra Day O'Connor retired and the RATs were going BALLISTIC at the mere suggestion that her replacement might be another Republican who is slightly to her right? They were screaming that O'Connor was a moderate and ANOTHER moderate MUST be named out of respect for the precious justice and not to upset the precious idealogical balance of the court.
We should throw their own words in their faces. If Obama accuses the GOP of being "obstructionsts", they can reply that they're happily willing to play ball and have an up-or-down vote on a nominee as long as Obama agrees to nominate one with the "advise" of the Senate, and send him a list of three Scalia clones as "bipartisan, consensus picks" (Janice Rogers Brown, etc.) Of course Obama will cry fowl, and then they can have a press conference and say "hey, we met with the President and were willing to compromise -- we AGREED to his demands to vote on a new justice before the next President is sworn in. He REFUSED to do it because he doesn't want the Senate involved in a bipartisan selection process."