HYDE PARK — President Barack Obama returned to the University of Chicago Thursday to make his case for Merrick Garland to fill the vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans in the U.S. continued on Thursday to say they wouldn’t hold confirmation hearings for Garland until after the next presidential election, but senators have been meeting with Garland in private.
If you start getting into a situation where the process of appointing judges is so broken that a qualified justice can’t even get a hearing, we’re going to see the sharp partisan politics we see in our electoral system creeping into the judicial system, Obama said.
“That erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch and people lose faith that the courts can fairly adjudicate cases and controversies,” Obama said.
Garland and Obama both have ties to Chicago and both the president and former Justice Antonin Scalia taught at U. of C., so it made some sense that Obama would return to the university to make his case for Garland.
“It was really fun [teaching at U. of C.] and I missed it so I thought why don’t I come back and say hi to everybody," Obama joked before launching into his case for Garland.
He said the court would continue to face long-running issues of contention like abortion, but will also face new cases about encryption that will present difficult problems for the court.
"In a society in which so much of your life is digitized, people have a whole new set of privacy issues that are understandable," Obama said. "They also expect that the digital world is safe which creates a contradictory expectation on the government."
He also said he thought elections and campaigning would return to the courts with questions about political participation, voting and money in politics.
“We really are the only advanced democracy on Earth that systematically and purposefully makes it really hard for people to vote and we take for granted that that is just how it is," Obama said.
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Early into the event the conversation turned to the audience, which included faculty and students from the university and also justices from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and other local judges.
Students asked Obama what he would do to further reform the criminal justice system during his final months in office.
Obama said the consensus was growing to reduce the prison population and new commonality between liberals, Libertarians, evangelicals and others.
“Now we’ve got some really interesting coalitions. We’ve got the ACLU and the Koch brothers agreeing, which doesn’t happen often," Obama said.
Other students asked if Obama thought the divisions in the Democratic Party could become as extreme as the divide in the Republican Party.
"The cleavages in the Democratic Party are not comparable to what we’re seeing in the Republican Party right now," Obama said, pointing to the policy issues the two Democratic presidential candidates agreed on.
He said the populist streak in the presidential election flowed from frustration leftover from the financial recession.
“There’s a sense the game is rigged and we have to more fundamentally change that game, that system, whether its Wall Street or how Washington operates," Obama said.
The event was positioned as a conversation with Obama and legal scholars, judges and attorneys more invested in the judicial system than the outcome of the political debate happening at the Capitol.
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Obama was scheduled to fly to California later in the evening for a fundraiser and it was unclear whether he would be making stops to the potential sites for his presidential library in the nearby Jackson and Washington parks.
He was accompanied to Chicago by his daughter Malia, who attended school in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School before Obama was elected president.
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